What is the typical AVL (automated vehicle location) system message frequency?

[AndrewRudin1]

I'm trying to do some capacity planning for our GeoEvent server to handle AVL data.  For those of you that have integrated GeoEvent with your AVL systems, what is the average frequency of messages from each vehicle to the AVL hosting server?  For example, does each vehicle send a message every 5 seconds?  every 10 seconds? every 60 seconds

Actually I guess there are 3 levels of detail on message frequency across the data pipeline:

1. How often does each vehicle's device obtain a GPS location?
2. How often does each vehicle's device send position data to the hosting server?
3. How often does GeoEvent query the hosting server to obtain new data?

I'm just trying to get a feel for what the industry standard is these days.

Thank you for any insights you can provide

-Andrew

[BrianLomas · Accepted solution]

We are using Sierra Wireless MP70 modems for 9 vehicles, currently. This system relies on MQTT messages to send and receive data at 5 second intervals. The time interval is configurable with 5 seconds being the shortest amount of time possible which is the setting we use. If the vehicle is driven a lot it comes out to about 45,000 pts/day. However, it's unusual for a vehicle to have that many pts in a day. I would say the average is around 20,000 pts/day. We archive approximately 19 days worth of data in a PostGres DB which maintains around 1.5million+ points total across all vehicles and is around 4G in size. Hope that helps. Good luck.

[AndrewRudin1]

Thank you Brian.

I've heard from another source that the typical frequency can very, but 3-5 seconds up to minutes is possible.