Fuel allocation and lockout system

Abstract

In transport and Logistics business with the fierce competition, avoiding fuel theft through monitoring and management is a major concern in Africa. With the steadily increase in fuel price, fuel theft and fraud poses a serious threat to transporters' operating profits. In this paper the development of a secure fuel dispensing system with a digital fuelling record book is presented for the use of fleet based companies. The proposed system prevents the refuel of unauthorised vehicles, notifies the owner any time a vehicle is refuelled, with information containing the vehicle name, date and amount of fuel dispensed into the vehicle. The vehicle identification is done by the use of low-frequency radio frequency identifier (RFID) tags. A fuel lockout system is implemented to shut down the fuel pump. The system uploads the fuel data to a server in custom hourly intervals chosen by the user. The design flow and experimental results for a prototype system is presented.