Automatic Vehicle Locator

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What Does Automatic Vehicle Locator Mean?

An automatic vehicle locator (AVL) is a technology that businesses or individuals can use to track vehicles in real time.

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Many AVL systems make use of global positioning systems (GPSs). These AVL systems rely on extensive mapping that has been done to support GPS-based applications and satellite services.

Techopedia Explains Automatic Vehicle Locator

Automatic vehicle locator systems provide specific user interfaces for tracking vehicles and finding out more about actual transport in real time. For example, different systems have different features for labeling vehicles, looking at vehicle location history, etc.

In terms of the engineering and design of these systems, they use radio frequency to deliver signals from a vehicle to a central base, which can be as simple as a personal computer attached to the Internet. This is called a "radio to Internet" design, where the base takes the data and sends it over the Internet. Now, companies are designing even newer kinds of systems that can provide extra functionality, such as determining how many passengers are in a given vehicle.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.