Every year, the Swedish Police Authority receives 9,000 serious or urgent cases of missing people; About 450 are assessed as life-threatening and lead to time-critical search and rescue efforts. Electronic communication equipment, such as smartphones, are common in society and have the potential to play an important part in the search for missing people.

In this presentation we will describe our work on a platform to support search for missing people using both traditional map-based data sources and radio-based localization methods. We will describe the process, the collaborations along the way that have shaped the project, and how the platform has been used for localizing missing people in several years of student projects.

The platform is based on QGIS/POSTGIS and includes components for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth device detection and localization, mobility modeling, drone-based sensing, search progress monitoring and mobile phone localization. Other data sources that have been used in the platform are elevation data, vegetation data, road network data and satellite image data.

Some of the functionalities have been developed with input from the Swedish Police, Missing People and the Swedish Maritime Agency.