Dynamic coordination in fleet management systems: Toward smart cyber fleets

Abstract

Fleet management systems are commonly used to coordinate mobility and delivery services in a broad variety of domains. However, their traditional top-down control architecture becomes a bottleneck in open and dynamic environments, where scalability, proactiveness, and autonomy are becoming key factors for their success. Here, the authors present an abstract event-based architecture for fleet management systems that supports tailoring dynamic control regimes for coordinating fleet vehicles, and illustrate it for the case of medical emergency management. Then, they go one step ahead in the transition toward automatic or driverless fleets, by conceiving fleet management systems in terms of cyber-physical systems, and putting forward the notion of cyber fleets. © 2014 IEEE.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the projects “Agreement Technologies” (grant CSD2007-0022; CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010), “intelligent Human-Agent Societies” (grant TIN2012-36586-C03-02), and “Smart Delivery” (grant RTC-2014-1850-4).Peer Reviewe