Robust Emergency Services Performing Operations iN Electric

Our emergency services, like other organisations, are creating strategies for their net-zero transition. A key barrier to the introduction of zero-emission emergency response vehicles is ensuring operational performance and resilience considering limited electric vehicle range and recharging times. A future emergency service dispatch system will need to make decisions based on data from a broad range of sources, understand journey energy requirements and optimise energy and charging infrastructure use.

Project RESPONSE (Robust Emergency Services Performing Operations iN Electric) will examine the barriers within the supply chain holding back the development of an integrated zero-emission emergency service operations planning and dispatch platform.

Cenex, a not for profit research organisation active in providing emergency service fleets with net-zero transition support, will bring together a stakeholder group defining the requirements of future electric emergency vehicle dispatch platforms, considering barriers and solutions to development and commercialisation. The stakeholder working group represents a total of 19 blue-light fleets who are the Problem Owners benefiting from the optimal sharing of transport and energy data.

Flexible Power Systems (FPS) is a UK based SME, founded in 2018 on the principle that smart use of energy and vehicle data can dramatically reduce the costs and risk of commercial fleet electrification, will undertake the technical feasibility and design of a data sharing platform to inform the dispatch system of planning inputs for electric vehicle and charging. FPS will demonstrate the benefits of their platform solution in a digital twin environment.

Project RESPONSE will study the barriers and solutions to data sharing in electric vehicle emergency dispatch systems in two key areas.

The first, reviews quality and availability of vehicle, charger, grid, shift and emergency data and how it can be best fed securely to dispatch systems for robust decarbonised emergency services.

The second will look at wider benefits that an integrated data platform can bring and how data held by different supply-chain actors can be shared. Wider benefits include integrating electric vehicle scheduling inputs across fleets and services to manage responses to cross-boundary events and national emergencies where electric vehicle response needs co-ordinating on a national level. Data sharing could also allow infrastructure sharing and enhance procurement practices.