AWS-Based IoT System for Automated Fleet Management

About Our Client

The Client is an Australian company that provides IoT solutions for fleet, asset, and team management optimization to 2,000+ corporate customers.

Challenge

The Client provides fleet management IoT solutions and a variety of tracking devices to businesses across the globe. As the core of its IoT solutions, the Client used third-party fleet management SaaS platforms. However, the platforms charged each of the Client’s IoT devices separately, and when the Client’s customer base grew to over 2,000 firms with 26,500+ IoT devices, the subscription costs increased greatly. So, the Client decided to develop a custom fleet management solution, which would be much more cost-effective in the long term.

Solution

In 2019, the Client commissioned ScienceSoft, a fleet management software developer with 12-year experience in IoT, to build its new fleet management solution. In 2020, ScienceSoft’s IoT team delivered a custom fleet management system hosted on AWS. The solution supports GPS trackers and accelerometers as well as temperature and humidity sensors that are connected via Bluetooth. The system consumes, stores and processes data from sensors, and users can access the processed data via web and mobile apps.

To ensure a quicker payback from the solution, ScienceSoft started by delivering an MVP. Already at that stage, the Client was able to switch the users who needed just the features the MVP covered, from the SaaS platforms to the custom solution, thus, reducing the subscription fees. After that, our team was continuously improving the solution’s functionality and adding new features according to the Client’s requirements.

The project team has implemented the following functionality for the solution so far:

• Real-time and historical tracking – GPS trackers collect data about events (e.g., stops), geo zone, speed, mileage, and location of vehicles. This data is presented in the form of dashboards or reports.
• Maintenance management – automated reminders about the need to perform vehicle maintenance depending on the date of previous maintenance, a vehicle’s mileage or engine running time. Also, the solution enables vehicle maintenance cost tracking.
• Document management – tracking the validity of permissions, driving licenses, and other fleet-related documents and generating alerts when they’re about to expire.
• Forms management – creating and filling out inspection forms on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis; creating and filling out incident forms that can include a date, time, and description as well as photos and a signature.
• Data import from fuel card companies (e.g., time of refill, fuel type, driver) and reporting on such data.
• Driver scoring – the solution analyzes driver behavior (e.g., instances of harsh braking, acceleration or cornering, excessive idling, overspeeding) and provides a total score per each driver to evaluate the quality of driving.
• Instant messaging via a mobile app that enables communication between the drivers and their managers.
• Asset tracking for tracking the location of assets, such as containers carried by vehicles.
• Integrations with a fleet maintenance management system and an analytics tool for vehicle tracking data.

The current project team consists of 3 front-end developers, 4.5 FTEs of PHP developers, and 1 DevOps engineer. Also, iOS and Android developers join the project to update the corresponding mobile apps, when the need arises.

Our DevOps engineer takes great care to ensure the solution’s scalability at reasonable costs. He is constantly monitoring the load across all the used AWS services. If the load is approaching the limits within a certain AWS service, our expert manually adds resources.

Results

The Client received a cost-effective and scalable fleet management product that can easily support thousands of devices. The Client is fully satisfied with the ongoing partnership with ScienceSoft and continues cooperation to further enrich the product’s functionality. As of December 2022, our team is implementing the billing functionality by creating integrations with the Client’s accounting system and a payment processing platform. The feature will support automated generation of invoices for the solution's users and payments by cards and bank transfers.

Technologies and Tools

Cloud: AWS (EC2, Amazon Relational Database Service, RabbitMQ, MemoryDB, OpenSearch, SNS, SES, CloudWatch).

Front end: Angular.

Back end: PHP, Symfony, PostgreSQL.