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. In this paper, we first 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, we go one step ahead in the transition towards automatic or driverless fleets, by conceiving Fleet Management Systems in terms of Cyber-Physical Systems, and putting forward the notion of Cyber Fleets. We illustrate the idea in the field of electro mobility, where we expect drivers of smart e-motorbikes (Cyber Vehicles), equipped with an intelligent communication device (Cyber Helmet), to coordinate in a context-aware manner as part of a decentralised Fleet Management System.