preventiv, public health

1. An Automated Embedded Detection and Alarm System for
Preventing Accidents of Passengers Vessel due to Overweight
F.M. Javed Mehedi Shamrat†
Dept. of Software Engineering
Daffodil International University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
javedmehedicom@gmail.com
Zarrin Tasnim
Dept. of Software Engineering
Daffodil International University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
zarrint25@gmail.com
Naimul Islam Nobel
Dept. of Software Engineering
Daffodil International University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
nobel775@diu.edu.bd
Md. Razu Ahmed
Dept. of Software Engineering
Daffodil International University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
razu35-1072@diu.edu.bd
ABSTRACT
One of the prominent transport system in Bangladesh is rivers and
seas. Vessel overloading is found in Bangladesh as the main cause
of accidents on the rivers and seas. Therefore, there must be a role
to play in ensuring passenger safety on the vessels. In Bangladesh,
the researchers are more focusing on the data collection related to
vessel overloading and sinking. However, there is a need to
overcome vessel overloading. This paper design and develop an
embedded automated system which able to identify overweight and
detect the location of a vessel. The proposed system segregated into
three modules such as, the Location Detection Module (LDM)
always tracks the current location of the vessel for monitoring; the
Overweight Detection Module (ODM) measure the exceed water
level of the vessel to identify the overweight issue; the Notification
Module (NM) is responsible for generating message service (SMS)
to notify nearby coast guard to stop the vessel. The result shows the
successful overweight detection, location tracking, and instant
notification send up-to-the-10 seconds. It can be noted that our
proposed prototype can be embedded with any type of vessels
including passenger vessel, general cargo vessel, etc.
KEYWORDS
Automation, IoT, embedded system, vessel, safety, raspberry Pi 3
Model B, microcontroller, floating switch.
ACM Reference format:
F.M. Javed Mehedi Shamrat, Zarrin Tasnim, Naimul Islam Nobel and Md.
Razu Ahmed. 2019. An Automated Embedded Detection and Alarm
System for Preventing Accidents of Passengers Vessel due to Overweight.
In Proceedings of the 4th international conference on big data and
internet of things - BDIoT'19, Rabat, Morocco.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3372938.3372973
1 Introduction
Passenger's vessel is one of the most used vehicles on the water in
Bangladesh. However accident rates are increasing according to the
department of shipping (1977 to 2013) in 38 years there been 4420
people death, 520 people injured and 400 people remained missing.
One of the main reasons behind those accidents was overloading.
Overloading has been found as the main cause of accidents having
a maximum share of 56% [6]. Overloading the vessel for
maximizing profit is the general tendency of vessel operators in
Bangladesh. Most of the vessels willing to carry both excess cargos
and passengers on the upper deck. The overload limit is 4/5 times
of their capacity from the given limit. These trends increase the top
weight of the vessel and make it unstable.
Because of the greediness of the money, some dishonest owner
of passenger’s vessel takes a passenger from the riverbank and for
an extra income they load passenger from waterway also that’s why
the vessel becomes overweight. To detect this overweight issue
embedded system has been developed to prevent accidents from
happening. The safety measuring model for passenger vessel is
basically an IoT based project. The currently built prototype of this
embedded system sends a signal to a server of weight status and
current location of the vessel using the internet. Whenever the
system detects the vessel is over-weighted it sends a signal to the
server and automated embedded system contact to coast guard to
stop the vessel on the waterway. Two types of sensors one is float
switch sensor which will give us the status of vessel weight and
another type is GPS tracker which will provide us the current
location. This raw data will be received by the microcontroller; it
will send data to raspberry pi via the internet. Raspberry Pi will
analyze the raw data to identify the overweight status and make a
decision either need to notify the coast guard or not. This embedded
system will prevent a lot of life from loss due to this overnighted
problem.
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BDIoT'19, October 23–24, 2019, Rabat, Morocco
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7240-4/19/10…$15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3372938.3372973

2. The rest of the paper discusses the literature review in section 2,
the proposed System Methodology and Flowchart Diagram consist
of section 3, in section 4 discussed System Design and
Architecture, in section 5 short brief of used component’s an entire
system diagram and in section 6 discussed the implementation set.
2 Literature Review
In recent years some research papers have been published where
researchers have shown different types of vessels, vessel
maintenance, vessel architecture, and cost consumption to make up
the vessels. But they have few works on vessel safety to measure
overload for avoiding overweight related accidents.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the major reasons behind
the accident that occurs in the waterways by studying some major
accident cases that occurred over the years. From the study, it is
observed that the primary cause of an accident is the overloading
issue. To avoid accidents, institutional reforms at the same time
points to improve the existing vessels as well as the new ones and
point every individual should take is suggested [1].
The main objective of this paper is to portrait a system to
prevent passenger vessel accidents due to overloading. In the
system, multiple vessels connected through a star network, contain
water level detectors and GPS trackers that sends the data of water
level and the location of the vessels to a central hub through radio
frequency. This data is stored in a raspberry pi and displayed in a
web application [2].
This paper provides an analysis of the number of marine vessels
and passenger vessel accidents that occurred over the last two
decades and collision, overloading and inclement weather are the
most frequent causes of passenger vessel accidents. The paper
suggests that strict policies to be applied in order to avoid accidents
due to overloading [3].
From the study, it is observed that adverse weather and
overloading are the primary reasons behind the inland marine
accidents over the years. With the help of the event tree, it is shown
that visibility aids help to avoid accidents occurring due to
overloading in both good weather and bad weather [4].
In this paper, the author suggested an autonomous system to
prevent accidents due to the overloading and instability of
waterway vessels. Load cells are used that are connected to each
other to transmit load data to the receiver module at the center. The
receiver calculates the data to determine the load and center of
gravity and sends the report to the crew of the vessel through
Bluetooth [5].
In the prior researches done, there was no system suggested that
could make a decision based on the weight of the vessel and notify
the authorities about the vessel’s condition and location so that
proper actions can be taken.
From the research gap, an embedded system based on an
approach to passenger vessel safety is proposed. An embedded
system is developed that will provide the overweight status and
location of the vessel to proper authorities in order to prevent
accidents from happening. The developed system can prevent
losing thousands of lives which are risked every day because of the
accidents due to overloading issues.
3 Proposed System
Design the proposed embedded system, to detect or read the value
(current level of water) from a vessel to analyzing the collected data
for the vessel passenger safety issue. In-vessel need to identify a
breakpoint that indicates the exceeding water level or indicate the
overweight. Vessel weight needs to calculate to identify the
breakpoint of the vessel.
It all comes down to a principle called "buoyancy," and can be
explained by what is known as "Archimedes' Principle." What this
principle basically states is that a floating object displaces an
amount of liquid equal in weight to the weight of the object. This
means that the amount of water displaced by a boat, no matter how
full that boat is, weighs as much as the boat. The weight is related
to the volume of water displaced by,
Weight = (Gravity)*(Density of Water)*(Volume of water
displaced).
This is where the dimensions of the boat become very important.
The volume of water displaced by the boat is equal to the volume
occupied by the part of the boat that is below the surfaces of the
water. Once the volume of displaced water is greater than the total
volume of the boat, it means that the top of the boat will no longer
be above the water and the boat will sink [6].
Figure 1: Vessel floating and displaced water.
We can find the total upward force on the can be exerted by water
pressure (which we call the buoyant force Fbuoyant) by simply taking
the difference between the magnitudes of the upward force Fup and
downward force Fdown ,
Fbuoyant = Fup − Fdown (1)
“Archimedes Principle Formula” is known as [7],
𝐹 = 𝜌𝑔𝑉 (2)
Where, Buoyant force of a given body = F,
Volume of the displaced fluid = v,
acceleration due to gravity = g,
As we see that density ρρ = ρf – ρg. Here ρf is the density of the
fluid and ρg is the density of the body. Thus, the formula can also
be articulated as,
𝐹 = (𝜌𝑓 − 𝜌𝑔)𝑔𝑉 (3)
This formula is helpful in finding the buoyant force, the volume of
the displaced body, the density of fluid or density of body if some

3. of these numeric values are known or firstly need to find out these
numeric values to implement Archimedes formula.
In figure 2 we have shown the flowchart diagram of the embedded
system that we have actually done in the embedded system.
Figure 2: Flowchart Diagram of the Proposed System.
4 System Design and Architecture
1.1 System Overview
Our proposed system contains three (3) modules. Those are given
below:
1. Location Detection Module (LDM).
2. Overweight Detection Module (ODM) and
3. Notification Module (NM)
Figure 3 shows the overall circuit diagram of our proposed
passenger vessel safety system consists of Location Detection
Module (LDM), Overweight Detection Module (ODM) and
Notification Module (NM).
Figure 3: System Circuit Diagram.
In the location detection module (LDM) it will always track the
current location of the vessel for monitoring. We use ultimate GPS
V3 a boost with this external active antenna. This GPS antenna
draws about 10mA and will give an additional 28 dB of gain. It's
got a 5-meter long cable so it will easily reach wherever actually
needs it to. The antenna is magnetic so it will stick to the top of a
car or truck (or any other steel structure). Used to detect the location
of the specific object. GPS sensor will connect directly to ESP8266
Node MCU. ESP8266 and GPS sensor pin GND to GND, 3V3 to
VCC, D1 to RX and D2 to TX have been integrated. Wi-Fi
connection is must be connected with the GPS tracker device to
send the current vessel location to the server and retrieve the server
data to see the location on the monitor.
In figure 4 we have shown the using of Location Detection
Module (LDM) through the Circuit Diagram.
Figure 4: Location Detection Module (LDM).
In Overweight Detection Module (ODM) its measures the
exceed water level of the vessel to identify the overweight issue.
From equation (1) & equation (2) we defined how to find the max
capacity a vessel can carry out [7]. We use a water float sensor to
detect the water level and it placed the body of the vessel (see in
Figure. 8). The sensor switch can measure or monitor the water
level by moving up and down in its row. It’s basically made only
for counting water level data [8]. After detecting the current level
of water, it sends the data to the Node-Red Server of the raspberry
pi. The embedded system process the data using an algorithm to
measure the current status of the vessel weight and send the
notification to the coast guard to stop the vessel. The sensor will
connect directly to ESP8266 Node MCU. ESP8266 and Water float
switch sensor pin GND to Pin 1, D5 to Pin 2 has been integrated.
In figure 5 we have shown the using of Overweight Detection
Module (ODM) through the Circuit Diagram.
Figure 5: Overweight Detection Module (ODM).
In our proposed system the Notification Module (NM) is
responsible for generating message service (SMS) with GPS link to
notify nearby coast guard to stop the vessel. It also provides the
exact location of the vessel with the help of the GPS antenna. We
sending SMS via the API by install the module sinchsms (python

4. library) in python. It only required an internet connection with the
microcontroller. An external GSM modem is connected to the
microcontroller through a serial cable or a USB cable [9]. It
operates at either 900 MHz or 1800 MHz frequency band and it can
support data transfer of up to 9.6 Kbit/s [10]. In order to operate a
GSM modem is also requires a SIM card by which it establishes
and manages the connection. The GSM modem comes with a serial
interface in which the modem can be controlled using AT command
interface [11]. GSM modem supports a common set of standard AT
commands which integrated with the multi-controller. After
successful connection the program is written in microcontroller to
perform the specific task it is up to [12]. The modem produces
warning text SMS to the mobile phone of the authority after it
receives a command. Getting the SMS will help the authority to act
fast and will help to stop the vessel. When the weight of the vessel
becomes over the system will send SMS only those people of that
authority and coast guard. For GSM modem a special subscription
to an SMS service provider is not required which makes it more
cost-effective and efficient [13].
Figure 6: Flowchart of Notification Module (NM).
5 Used Component’s
Developing the proposed embedded smart vessel safety system, the
following hardware component is used. Here, the components are
presented. Component required raspberry Pi 3 Model B [14],
Microcontroller Node MCU (ESP8266) [15], water level floating
sensor switch [8], GPS antenna (Ultimate GPS V3) [16], output
monitor (HDMI or USB monitor).
By assembling all of these components, the proposed embedded
system has been designed and developed. Figure 7 represents the
diagram of the entire system.
Figure 7: Diagram of the Entire System.
6 Implementation
To implement this embedded system some components need to
combine. Previously we described the main components of the
system. In Figure: 3 we have shown a circuit diagram to describe
elaborate the component connectivity structure and in figure 8 and
figure 9, we have shown the Implementation setup.
Figure 8: Implementation set of Hardware of the entire system.

5. Figure 9: A Closer look at the Output Monitor.
Water floating sensors switch are installed at the breakpoint of the
vessel (see figure 7). It reads the water level (ODM) if the vessel is
overweighed than the water level of the vessel will increase.
Sensors will send the data request to the server (Node-RED)
through the internet, raspberry pi B will read the data from the
server and visualize the data and location (LDM) of the vessel to
the output device (see figure 8, figure 9). The monitoring man will
notify (NM) the coast guard to stop the vessel.
7 Conclusion
Automation in passenger vessel safety is very much demanding
issues in the current era for safety issues. Several approaches are
working on this issue. This embedded system has been designed,
developed and implemented by the Python programming language.
Several experiments have been performed to analyses the approach
and found a satisfactory level. Applied of this system can protect a
thousand of life, family, and dreams.
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