Advances in decision-making support tools for fleet management in emergency and security applications

Fleet management is actually a very hot topic in development and research. Modern organizations such as goods transportation companies and emergency/security agencies need to track and coordinate their resources in real-time, typically for supporting control-center officers and optimizing the overall planning. This kind of tools are called decision support systems. This paper introduces the architecture and features of an integrated tool designed to support advanced positioning functionalities (i.e., location validation, prediction, accuracy support, indirect location) and to acquire and exploit heterogeneous geo-referenced data-sources distributed on the territory, such as traffic and weather monitoring stations. The proposed framework integrates a reasoning engine that resolves inverse problems by means of optimization algorithms, such as ANT colony optimization and particle swarm optimizer. The tool is under validation by dozen of fire-fighters units and at the Centrale Unica Emergenza (CUE) agency for centralized emergency management of the Autonomous Province of Trento, Italy.