Guidelines for the use of GPS-based AVL systems in public transport fleets

The advances in the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the dramatic price reduction which has been experienced by GPS products has turned GPS into an affordable and effective technology for the design of public transport fleet management solutions. An in-depth analysis of GPS-based fleet location systems in five European sites and the additional experiences outside Europe have shown that GPS has all it needs to become the automatic vehicle location technology for public transport fleets. It does not introduce propagating errors (like dead reckoning) and does not require distributed infrastructure on the ground (like signposts). The main drawbacks, limited availability and accuracy, can be solved by integrating a dead reckoning system and adopting differential GPS (DGPS), respectively. Since these add-ons have a clear influence on first time costs, system design must be tightly driven by application requirements and by an up-to-date view on the rapidly evolving world of location and communication solutions.