Navigation Control of Cargo Transportation in the North of Russia

Abstract

To develop the northern territories and ensure a normal life for people working there, significant quantities of construction materials, fuel, machinery, equipment, food and other goods are needed, a significant part of which must be transported to these territories. The peculiarity of the processes of transportation of goods to the Northern regions by road is that most of the transportation process is carried out using temporary roads which are called winter (or snow) roads [1, 2].Unlike permanent paved roads with corresponding infrastructure maintenance elements, winter roads have a traffic track representing a snow-cleared lane without specially prepared layers of pavement. The track has temporary landmarks [3, 4]. However, in bad weather, sudden changes in temperature, the route can be «lost», which negatively affects reliability and safety of the transportation process. Geoinformatics tools allow to create a virtual spatial model of a temporary road, which can be shown on an electronic map [5–7]. Satellite navigation tools form actual navigation data, which are « linked» to the route by means of geoinformatics. The current location of a vehicle on a winter road track can be displayed using an electronic terrain map on a display screen of an on-board telematic unit [8–10]. The objective of the article is to consider the main tasks that are solved by the supervisory control system when monitoring movement of vehicles on temporary winter roads. Using mathematical methods and special methods of analysis and planning of road transportation, a methodological basis has been developed to increase the level of automation of basic functions of the dispatch control of road transportation of goods in mixed multimodal traffic based on the use of information generated by GLONASS global navigation system. It is shown that the use of geoinformatics, mobile communications and satellite navigation will significantly improve reliability and safety of the processes of cargo transportation in the North of Russia. According to experts, the use of the proposed methodology allows reducing time for cargo handling by an average of 30 % and decision-making time by 50 %, as well as increasing the efficiency of using vehicles by reducing by 95 % the number of deviations from the planned schedule.