It has always been a challenge to maintain a fleet of vehicles like in transport company or a call taxi, which are always on the move and needs to be controlled centrally. And it is a much bigger task to be accomplished when it comes to the controlling of Police Patrol Vans, Arya Omni Talk Wireless Solutions Ltd. Pune has designed and installed one such system for Chennai Police to monitor & Control the Patrol Vehicles.

Automatic Vehicle Location System (AVLS) helps to identify the location of a Vehicle anywhere in Chennai and displays it on a Digitized map of Chennai. AVLS software installed in the computer gets the location of the Patrol Vans from the AVLS Server and marks the location on the digital map. The operator in the Control Room will also locate the vehicles without asking the Driver of the patrol vehicle about location of vehicle.

All the computers in the control room get the vehicles data from AVLS Server. This server locates the vehicle by getting the data from the vehicle on a polling basis over RF backbone. The updates of the vehicle location are sent from each vehicle at an interval of one minute. A mobile unit along with a GPS antenna is installed in the Patrol Vehicle, which calculates the exact location and speed of a particular patrol vehicle. This data after processing is transmitted by RF to the Control Room. This data is then verified for its integrity and plotted on the Map. The 1:10,000 scale digitized map of Chennai has the details of all arterial roads, sub-arterial  roads and by lanes. In addition to it, Police Station names, major building names, important landmarks are also marked. It has the details to the House Numbers.

49 Patrol Vehicles of Chennai Police have been installed with this equipment. The Online updates from these vehicles are via RF backbone with repeaters in Sembium and Pallavaram. These 49 vehicles are divided into two zones depending on their location. The 15 vehicles in the Northern part of Chennai are covered by the repeater in Sembium, 17 Vehicles in the Southern part are covered by the Pallavaram Repeater and the remaining 17 vehicles in central zone are covered by the Pallavaram as well as Sembium repeaters depending on this location and its proximity to either Pallavaram or Sembium.

The updates from the vehicles are polled from the server. In normal condition all the patrol vans are polled simultaneously. The server also has the options of polling one particular vehicle at a time. Apart from this some specified vehicles can be polled together & some vehicles can be omitted from polling.

At the user end, the digitized map comes with different options for easy use by the operator ready buttons are available on the map for browsing the entire map. The display of the fleet of patrol vans on the map can be either the entire fleet or depending on the zone of operation. The map can automatically zoom to any particular vehicle by just selecting it.

Location search is available with which the map automatically zooms itself to a particular location. Apart from this all the major Police Stations, landmarks, buildings are marked. And the search can also be done with the names of buildings or landmarks. Important locations can also be marked and labeled on the map manually. The distance between two points in a specified route can be found by marking it on the map. It also has the feature of Automatic Pop-up of location wherein a scene of occurrence cane be automatically displayed so that a nearest patrol van can be identified.

Other important feature is the history of a patrol van. The entire route of a vehicle for a specified time on any day can be pulled out with the display of the time. This can later be played on the map for analysis.

Apart from this AVLS is flexible for adding more features and future up gradations. With the installation AVLS, the entire fleet of patrol vans can be controlled more effectively and can be monitored and routed with case.

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