Introduction to GIS and Its Application in Highway Logistics Platforms

Human activities are closely tied to geographic location, and Geographic Information Science (GIS) collects, processes, visualizes, and analyzes spatial data to support decision making, especially in transportation and logistics.

The article begins with the story of John Snow, who plotted cholera deaths on a map in 19th‑century London, creating one of the earliest point‑map analyses that identified a contaminated water well as the disease source.

GIS is defined as the interdisciplinary field combining geography and computer science, encompassing data acquisition, processing, management, presentation, and spatial analysis such as clustering.

The GIS workflow is summarized as three steps: Data (map data, incident locations/counts), Presentation (map rendering, thematic layers), and Analysis (cluster analysis).

Building a GIS platform for highway logistics involves integrating road data, real‑time traffic, vehicle positions, and driver information into a big‑data platform, then feeding this into GIS to produce base maps, real‑time overlays, and high‑precision maps for visualization and spatial analysis, enabling functions like real‑time monitoring, dispatch, and hazard warnings.

Technical route: The platform relies on foundational surveying maps for global positioning, high‑precision maps and mobile surveying for local perception, and cloud services for processing due to vehicle compute limits. Precise positioning and high‑precision maps are identified as key enabling technologies for intelligent logistics.

Hardware support: Vehicles are equipped with GPS/BeiDou, LiDAR/millimeter‑wave radar, cameras, inertial navigation, and dedicated GPS/BeiDou modules as the backbone of the GIS platform, along with sensors for tire temperature, pressure, and fuel consumption to monitor vehicle health.

Software development: GIS addresses the spatial‑temporal fragmentation of logistics data, providing spatial data processing, route optimization, vehicle scheduling, and decision‑support models, thereby reducing costs, improving efficiency, and enhancing safety.

GIS platform applications:

Real‑time monitoring: GPS feeds vehicle locations to a map, enabling status tracking, remote lock, speed limits, deviation alerts, fatigue warnings, and emergency notifications.

Dispatch: GIS‑based command centers issue dynamic routing instructions, reducing empty runs and improving fleet utilization.

Path planning: Integrated path‑analysis modules consider load, customer distribution, traffic, weather, and road restrictions to generate cost‑optimal or shortest routes.

Information query: All vehicle movements are logged for easy retrieval, allowing customers to track shipments in real time.

Decision support: GIS combines historical, current, spatial, and attribute data for sales, market, site‑selection, and customer analyses, and integrates routing, network, and facility‑location models for automated, intelligent logistics management.

The article concludes that the GIS platform is under design and will empower the company to achieve intelligent scheduling of China's highway freight.

Author bio: Xu Yun, GIS engineer at Manbang Group, responsible for building the vehicle‑network GIS platform.