Internet of Things (IoT) applications for transportation logistics

INTRODUCTION

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the transportation industry. From passenger safety and fleet management to transport logistics and connected vehicles, smart transportation systems help move people and goods safely, more efficiently, and cost-effectively.

Smart transportation systems automate our highways, railways, airways, and waterways, improving the environment, public safety, and quality of life. They deliver products and passengers more quickly and productively, helping transportation companies improve economics and increase customer satisfaction.

ARE YOU READY FOR THE INTERNET OF THINGS?

Next-generation transportation systems must efficiently gather, analyze, and act upon massive volumes of data—very quickly and predictably. The Internet of Things introduces unprecedented scalability, reliability, and security challenges for transportation industry IT planners.

SCALABILITY

Vast numbers of endpoints—smart sensors, GPS devices, transponders, handheld devices—will generate unprecedented volumes of data. How will you collect, exchange, and process IoT big data?

RELIABILITY

Automated guidance and control systems and transport logistics solutions demand extreme reliability for safety, efficiency, and on-time delivery. How will you ensure continuous availability and high performance for critical data and applications?

SECURITY

Adding IoT elements—connected vehicles, beacons, sensors, mobile devices—to your network heightens security concerns. Device discovery, identification, and management become crucial. How will you safeguard data privacy and protect and manage systems against malicious attacks?

IOT SOLUTIONS FOR SMART TRANSPORTATION

Red Hat’s intelligent transportation systems solutions architecture is specifically designed to address the stringent scalability, reliability, and security requirements of the Internet of Things. The three-tier architecture is composed of distinct device, gateway, and application tiers for ultimate flexibility, extensibility, and economics.

The device tier contains smart endpoints that monitor the flow of goods, passengers and vehicles. The datacenter/cloud tier includes the applications and services that intelligently manage the transportation ecosystem such as fleet telematics, traffic control systems and transport logistics solutions. The gateway tier acts as an intermediary that facilitates communications, offloads processing functions, and drives action.
 

IOT GATEWAYS: THE CORNERSTONE OF SMART TRANSPORTATION

The gateway tier is the cornerstone of Red Hat’s smart transportation architecture. IoT gateways offload raw data processing, business logic execution, and device interactions from the application tier, enabling high scalability and performance. And they reduce data storage and processing requirements in the device tier, enabling simpler, more cost-effective endpoints.

Red Hat intelligent systems solutions include a complete set of standards-based IoT gateway foundational components, solving a variety of business challenges.

MEET STRINGENT IOT RELIABILITY AND AVAILABILITY REQUIREMENTS

Stable, open operating environment – Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux^®, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, provides a field-proven, highly reliable foundation for IoT gateway development. The solution brings military-grade security and 99.999% availability to IoT gateways.

BUILD MASSIVELY SCALABLE IOT SYSTEMS

Rapid application integration and data transformation – Red Hat Fuse is a lightweight, flexible enterprise service bus for automating routine services such as data routing, aggregation, and protocol mediation. The solution lets you connect a variety of diverse IoT components quickly and cost-effectively.

Efficient system-wide communications – Red Hat A-MQ is a lightweight messaging bus for asynchronously moving data between endpoints and control points. It connects systems, applications, and information across the IoT in a highly scalable and efficient manner.

ACCELERATE BIG DATA ANALYTICS PERFORMANCE

Advanced business logic execution – Red Hat Decision Manager supports comprehensive IoT business rules management and complex event processing. By executing business logic in the gateway you can efficiently scale IoT deployments, while enabling leaner, faster IoT applications.

Superior application performance – Red Hat Data Grid is a high throughput, low-latency in-memory, distributed NoSQL datastore solution for rapidly processing high volume, high-velocity IoT data. The solution accelerates big data analytics and improves application performance by distributing data processing across the IoT.

ELIMINATE END-POINT STORAGE COST AND COMPLEXITY

Extensible, high-capacity data collection – Red Hat Ceph Storage provides a highly scalable softwaredefined storage system for intermediate collection of IoT endpoint data. By offloading storage from the endpoints the solution enables simpler, less expensive IoT devices.
 

RED HAT’S TIERED SMART TRANSPORTATION ARCHITECTURE ENABLES HIGH SCALABILITY, RELIABILITY, AND SECURITY

Scalability – Gateway tier elements can be added in an incremental fashion to cost-effectively accommodate growth.

Reliability – Redundant architectural components can be deployed in each tier to eliminate single points-of-failure and ensure high service levels.

Security – Distinct security measures can be employed across tiers for a “defense-in-depth” approach that protects against the widest range of threats and vulnerabilities.

CONCLUSION

The Internet of Things introduces substantial business opportunities for transportation industry solution providers and systems integrators. Red Hat’s intelligent systems solution architecture lets you take full advantage of the IoT without compromising performance or service quality. Our standardsbased operating platforms, virtualization technologies, and middleware solutions address stringent transportation industry scalability, reliability, and security requirements so you can take on the IoT with confidence.