Use of Commercial GIS and GPS for Emergency Location and Dispatch

Max Cameron and Mark Schultz

Abstract:	In Colorado, a large scale operational test of a “Mayday” motorist emergency dispatch system has been launched under sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The project team is headed by the Enterprise Group, whose members include the FHWA, the state Departments of Transportation of Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Washington State, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, Transport Canada, and the Dutch Ministry of Transport. This Mayday test is evaluating use of Global Positioning System (GPS) location and Geographic Information System (GIS) display technology with cellular phone two-way communications to provide assistance to travelers in an emergency dispatch area of more than 12,000 square miles in central Colorado. As GIS become more widely used for applications such as emergency dispatch, it becomes ever more apparent that such systems needs to be more integrated and less modular. Disparate applications must all function as a single integrated system. The Colorado Mayday system involves a form of three tier architecture in which the first tier consists of an in-vehicle sensor that collects raw GPS data. The second tier is a communications system that transmits this data to the third tier, a control center which processes the data to calculate a position fix for the vehicle. After processing, the control center transmits the data to the appropriate emergency response organization. Program testing and implementation of the Colorado Mayday project reveal that all system technologies need to merge with data and applications to make a fully functional geoprocessing system. The Colorado “Mayday” emergency dispatch system recently passed its first critical milestone, demonstration of the technology. A large-scale operational test is the next phase. The Mayday system architecture and the system’s operational test program are described herein.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1995) June 5 - 7, 1995 Antlers Doubletree Hotel Colorado Springs, CO
Pages:	659 - 667
Cite this article:	Cameron, Max, Schultz, Mark, "Use of Commercial GIS and GPS for Emergency Location and Dispatch," Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1995), Colorado Springs, CO, June 1995, pp. 659-667.
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