Fleet management with automatic vehicle location

A dispatcher can improve a fleet's productivity by knowing where each vehicle in the fleet is located. This productivity gain is independent of whether reduced fleet costs, increased tonnage capacity, safe delivery of secure cargo or less down time due to distracted drivers is management's goal. This paper describes the portion of an automatic vehicle location system which has been designed to enhance fleet management depending on a variety of efficiency concerns. This subsystem, referred to as the Fixed End, is where the dispatcher manipulates the collected location information to make the decisions required to improve the fleet's performance. The Fixed End subsystem has three fundamental tasks it must perform: it must accept commands from the dispatcher then display and update the requested information, it must allow the dispatcher to control the communication rate between the Fixed End and the mobiles and it must allow the dispatcher to customize certain internal data structures to the desired use.