Thanks everyone for your comments on my first blog post on the AEM/AEMP Telematics Standard! Today, I would like to focus on data delivery and types in this new standard. I guess, most of this will be hidden from the average telematics user. But just as it is good to have a basic understanding how your car engine works, a brief look under the Telematics Standard hood can be very helpful.

Data Delivery

Let’s start on how the telematics data are delivered. I have heard a few times that with the new standard you would no longer need OEM or 3rd party solutions. Well, I think this is a misunderstanding, the standard standardizes the access to the telematics data. But the data transfer from the machine on the jobsite to a server or data center in the Internet is still done by the machine manufacturer or after-market telematics provider. The picture below shows examples of how data are transferred; 3 machines with 3 different telematics solutions (2 manufacturer ones and one 3rd party). As mentioned, the data are firstly transmitted to the data center of the telematics provider. The last leg of the communication, from the data center into the fleet owner’s telematics solution, is now standardized.

AEMP Data Transmission_smaller.jpg

Data Types

So, what type of data can you request from a data center, which supplies data according to AEM/AEMP standard? The standard distinguishes between two types of data, so-called snapshots and time-series data. As the names suggest, snapshots provide an overview of the current situation of a fleet or one asset (e.g. a machine), while time-series data allow you to get information about a selectable time period for a fleet or a single asset. For example, a snapshot provides the last received position of a machine and only the last one, while a series of positions allows to create a trace of a machine to see where your machine has travelled.

These different data types are handled behind the scenes of a telematics solution, which collects all the different data through the AEMP standard and most users should not need to worry about it. However, there is a sentence in the standards document puzzling me. It mentions that any machine providing time-series data “will contain a maximum of thirty days from the current […] date” (p. 3). So, my first interpretation would be that if you ask for (time-series) data from an OEM or 3rd party provider using the AEMP standard, you need to do this at least every 30 days and store the data in your own telematics solution, otherwise you might lose data. I guess, it is something to be aware of.

Data Calculation and Measurement

Finally, I just want to quickly raise a point about the data itself. There are data points like percent of fuel remaining or average daily load factor in the AEMP/AEM Telematics Standard. Obviously both set of information can be highly valuable for fleet managers and owners, but there is no description about how the measurements are performed or the calculations done. Please do not get me wrong, I am not proposing that anyone is purposely falsifying any data, but just consider the calculation of an average for example. In the long-run it is likely that you get different results depending whether you use rounded or exact values to calculate averages. So, even though the data arrive standardized, you might need to develop a general sense for the data you receive from your fleet.

After we covered the basics now, I will show a few examples what conclusions you can draw about a fleet even if you use only a few of the 19 data points next time.