North Dakota GIS Day 2004: Presentations
FOLLOW ME! AVL Systems to Track Vehicles and Communicate with Them in Rural and Urban Areas
Presenters: Malcolm Tonneson, Office Manager and Joseph Martinetti, GIS/CIS Specialist
Interstate Engineering, Inc.
» PowerPoint Presentation (770kb ppt)
North Dakota is a land of wide open spaces and few urbanized areas. Communication between people on the road and those at home or in the office in most of the state is limited. Knowing where someone on the road is could be almost impossible. Erecting radio and cell phone towers to allow for 100% coverage is a daunting and expensive task. An alternative is to communicate via communications satellite, which would provide for almost 100% coverage, but the costs could be astronomical. A marriage of the two systems could provide a feasible solution, in terms of both cost and communication. An automated vehicle locator (AVL, sometimes termed automatic vehicle location) system can be used to combine location with communication. AVL uses a global positioning system (GPS) receiver to track a vehicle, communicates through satellite or cell phone, monitors on-board activity through telemetry, and displays information on digital maps that is geo-referenced. These systems archive all of this information for later retrieval and analysis.
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