This paper and the following four papers were presented at the EURNAV-96 conference, held in London, 18–19 June 1996 and organized jointly by the Royal Institute of Navigation and the German Institute of Navigation. Copies of the full proceedings, comprising some 22 papers, may be obtained from the Director of the RIN.

I am delighted to be here at the EURNAV-96 conference. Vehicle navigation, location and control is a special interest of mine and I have no doubts about its value and potential.

This paper and the following two papers were presented at the Euronav 94 Conference organized by the DGON and the R1N and held in Dresden in June 1994.

Even today much time is lost in bringing effective help when an accident with a truck carrying dangerous goods occurs. The location of the accident is often not well described by the people reporting it. Often it is difficult to determine what sort of freight a lorry is carrying, for example when the vehicle is burning, and sometimes the fire brigade does not bring the appropriate extinguishing equipment for the first help approach. Now an emergency location system is under development which will remove all these disadvantages. For immediate help on car accidents, an automatic alert message is transferred from the crashed vehicle via the emergency call centre to the fire brigade, the police station or the headquarters of an ambulance. The alert is initiated by a crash sensor within the car or the truck. The data channel between vehicle and base can be a radio link or, for longer distances, a mobile telephone connection using CNET or GSM. AS help is faster and more effective with this system, environmental damage caused by dangerous goods can be reduced.

In Stuttgart the mobile part of the DGPS-based emergency location system has been integrated in several vehicles. The full system is being tested within a field trial of a pilot project called STORM (Stuttgart Transport Operation by Regional Management), which is part of a programme of the European Community. The results of these tests are summarized in this paper. The integration of the system into fleet management applications is also considered.