GoFleet, an open source tool available on Joinup, is designed to control and manage emergency vehicle fleets. This emergency management system is based on geographic information systems (GIS). It can perform analysis of available emergency resources, such as ambulances, police vehicles and fire trucks, based on their GPS location from an event that requires emergency services.

 

The GoFleet project started in 2009 and its first open source version was published in 2011. Most of the code is written by programmers working for Emergya, a Spanish free software company which leads the project.  The company started the project because it wanted to create software based on the available open source GIS solutions that would meet the growing demand of services that ensure interoperability. 

 

In order to make GoFleet interoperable, the developers implemented within it three open standards: Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and GPS eXchange Format (GPX). Both WMS and WFS are used for map visualisations and for setting geo-layers. The former standard, GPX, is a GPS standard that allows GoFleet to exchange information about layers and routes with other platforms. 

 

Developers working on the next version have explained that they aim to increase GoFleet’s stability by fixing a number of bugs, improving the documentation and providing an API system that will allow users to extend the software with plugins.

 

The company behind GoFleet estimated that it cost 110,000 euro to develop GoFleet’s open source version within a year. The software project is released under the GPLv2 license. “This kind of open source friendly licenses are a guarantee for us that third party contributions would be released under the same license as well,” the GoFleet developers commented.