IoT-Based System for Real-Time Monitoring and AI-Driven Energy Consumption Prediction in Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Transportation

Abstract

Temperature and humidity excursions during transport accelerate quality loss in fresh produce. This study develops and validates a self-contained Internet of Things (IoT) platform for in-transit monitoring and energy-aware operation. The battery-powered device operates independently of vehicle power and continuously logs temperature, relative humidity, GPS position, and onboard power draw. Power budgeting combines firmware-level deep-sleep scheduling with a LiFePO4 battery pack, enabling uninterrupted operation for up to four days. Using ∼10,000 time-stamped observations collected over four consecutive days in a standard dry truck (non-commercial validation), we trained and compared Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Random Forest (RF), and Linear Regression (LR) models to predict energy consumption under varying environmental and routing conditions. GBM and LR achieved high explanatory power ((Formula presented.)) with a mean absolute error of 0.77 A·h, while RF provided interpretable feature importance data, identifying temperature as the dominant driver, followed by trip duration and humidity. The end-to-end system integrates an EMQX MQTT broker, a Laravel web application, MongoDB storage, and Node-RED flows for real-time dashboards and multi-day historical analytics. The proposed platform supports proactive decision-making in perishable logistics, with the AI analysis validating that the collected time-aligned on-route data can configure sampling/transmit cadence to preserve autonomy under stressful conditions. © 2025 by the authors.