Abstract:
Many companies have employees on the road to visit clients, service customer
appliances or deliver goods.
Most of these client contacts are planned far in advance with great time margins.
Everybody has experiences of making appointments with a service company and
having to take a day off work to wait for the repairman to show up.
Calling the service center and asking for a more precise schedule is a waste of
time. In the same way, many of us have also encountered the problem from the
opposite point of view when you have an appointment with someone elsewhere
and face all the things that can go wrong.
The traffic conditions are hopeless and previous appointments tend to take
longer than expected (or appointments are at least not very predictable).
So there are two problems that one can determine from the description above.
One is that visibility of processes taking place outside the office (in terms of who
is where doing what) is poor and the other is that the planning and control of the
traveling part of outdoor trips is guesswork.
GUTS utilizing the features of JINI technology tries to facilitate the abovementioned
problem.
