Vehicle Telemetry Domain

Overview#

A police dispatcher has three units available and a priority call four miles away. The nearest unit by map distance has a low fuel warning and is already handling a secondary call. The AI recommendation surfaces the second-nearest unit, which is available and fully fuelled, with an ETA two minutes longer but no risk of an in-service breakdown. That kind of data-driven, real-world-aware dispatch decision is what the Vehicle Telemetry domain makes possible.

The domain connects external fleet management systems and automatic vehicle location (AVL) providers for operations dashboards and dispatch optimisation. It provides real-time vehicle position tracking, diagnostics monitoring, fault detection, and intelligent dispatch recommendations through a multi-provider integration architecture. All telemetry data feeds through a pluggable adapter layer and is stored in PostgreSQL, with positions surfaced directly into TAK clients (ATAK, WinTAK, CloudTAK) for tactical field operations.

Key Features#

Multi-Provider Integration: Connect to multiple external fleet management and AVL providers through a pluggable adapter system, allowing organisations to keep their existing fleet technology investments.
Real-Time Position Tracking: Monitor vehicle GPS positions, speed, heading, and driver information with freshness indicators to maintain accurate situational awareness of fleet deployments.
Vehicle Diagnostics: Access vehicle diagnostic data including fuel levels, odometer readings, engine status, battery voltage, and electric vehicle charging status for fleet health monitoring.
Fault Monitoring: Track vehicle fault codes with severity classification and acknowledgement workflows to identify maintenance needs and prevent equipment failures in the field.
Dispatch Recommendations: Receive AI-enhanced unit selection recommendations based on distance, estimated time of arrival, vehicle health, and current workload for optimal resource deployment.
Position History: Retrieve historical position data for route reconstruction and analysis, supporting after-action review and investigative use cases.
Fleet Analytics: Access shift handoff summaries, maintenance forecasting, and ETA accuracy metrics for fleet management oversight and continuous improvement.
Provider Health Monitoring: Track the connectivity and data quality of each integrated provider with automatic fault tolerance to maintain continuous telemetry even when individual providers experience issues.

Mermaid Diagram#

Use Cases#

Emergency Services: Use real-time position and ETA data to identify and recommend the nearest, most capable available unit for emergency response, factoring in vehicle health and current assignments.
Fleet Management: Monitor vehicle diagnostics and fault codes across the fleet to schedule preventive maintenance and prevent in-service failures that could leave crews without transport.
Law Enforcement: Replay position history to reconstruct vehicle routes for after-action review, incident investigation, or accountability purposes where officer movements are in dispute.
Public Safety Operations: Generate shift handoff summaries that capture fleet status, outstanding faults, and vehicle readiness for incoming shift supervisors, reducing handoff errors and blind spots.

Integration#

The Vehicle Telemetry domain supports fleet operations across the platform:

Dispatch: Real-time positions and recommendations support dispatch operations.
Unified Command: Vehicle positions feed into the Common Operating Picture.
Routing: Current vehicle locations serve as origins for route calculations.
Vehicle Management: Telemetry data enriches vehicle profile records.

Open Standards#

NMEA 0183: Vehicle and AVL position feeds are ingested via a dedicated NMEA 0183 parser that decodes GGA, RMC, and related sentences into canonical telemetry observations.
SAE J1939 / SAE J2540: Heavy-vehicle CAN-B diagnostic frames are decoded through a J2540 ingester that maps SAE J1939-71 Parameter Group Numbers to speed, position, and fault data surfaced in fleet diagnostics.
SAE J1979 (OBD-II): Passenger and light-commercial vehicle diagnostic trouble codes (DTCs) are retrieved from Geotab, Samsara, ZOLL, and Tyler New World adapters and classified by severity using the OBD-II code-prefix scheme.
ETSI TS 102 708: TETRA radio AVL protocol data units are decoded by a dedicated ingester, enabling direct position ingestion from TETRA-equipped emergency-service fleets without a separate gateway.
OGC SensorThings API (ISO 19505-1): Normalised AVL observations are published to a FROST-Server instance as SensorThings Things and Observations with WGS-84 GeoJSON point locations, allowing any SensorThings-compatible client to subscribe to vehicle position streams.
WGS-84 / EPSG:4326: All vehicle coordinates are stored and queried as PostGIS GEOGRAPHY(POINT,4326) columns, with ST_Distance and ST_DWithin used for nearest-unit calculations to ensure geodetically correct proximity results.
Cursor-on-Target (CoT): Vehicle positions flowing through the AVL layer are fanned out as Cursor-on-Target XML events, making fleet locations visible in ATAK, WinTAK, and CloudTAK tactical clients on the Common Operating Picture.
Trimble ASCII Interface Protocol (TAIP): RPV and RCP position-velocity messages from Trimble-based AVL hardware are parsed by a dedicated TAIP ingester, covering legacy and proprietary fleet tracking units.

Last Reviewed: 2026-02-24 Last Updated: 2026-04-14