Liaison: Sammy Urbina

Abstract

        Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation oversees over 70,000 acres and manages 182 parks across all of Los Angeles County. They currently utilize 600 vehicles to help them cover this vast expanse of land. Currently whenever an employee uses a county vehicle they must fill in a form stating where they are going, mileage of the car, gas level, etc. This process is time consuming and can cause an employee to lose precious time. The Fleet Management System allows for employees to quickly utilize a county vehicle without worrying about the paperwork. A Raspberry Pi is a tiny, single board computer and one will be placed in every county vehicle. It will record all data that comes from the car’s On-Board Diagnostics port, who is using the vehicle through a badge system, and record the path travelled via GPS. When the vehicle returns to county parking lots, the data from the car will be uploaded to the county servers and stored within a database. There are some details that the Raspberry Pi is unable to generate, so a web application was created for employees to fill in the remaining fields. The website is mobile friendly, so drivers can use it on their phones. Managers and supervisors can use the web application to see where employees are taking county vehicles and determine if the trips are valid uses of county resources.

        The main goal of this year was to create a useable prototype. The Raspberry Pi can generate all the necessary data using python scripts and utilize popular Internet of Things platforms for sending data. The system is easy to set up and is easily customizable. Python allows for new functionality to be added without interfering with other parts. The final test is a large scale one. Currently the system is only tested with a few Raspberry Pies, but the county has 600 vehicles that could possibly overwhelm the system that sends and retrieves data. This is only the initial year for the project and more work is needed to get the system into a deployable state. Long term testing will need to be done to find edge case bugs. This year we were able to create a prototype for the device that would be stored within every county vehicle, a web application that can be used to monitor and edit the information that came from the vehicle, and a dataflow system for ingesting vast amounts of information.

  Adviser/Liaison Meeting time: Thursday from 3:15 pm to 4:15 pm