A Mobile App for Searching Truck Parking Lots in Real Time

Description

A venture capitalist turned to Altoros to prototype a mobile app for truck drivers, aiming to raise additional funding and enter the EU market.

Brief results of the collaboration:

• The company delivered a prototype of a mobile app that facilitates search of truck parking lots in real time. With the functional prototype, the customer managed to raise additional funding for further growth in just 2 months after the project kick-off.
• The organization can enter the logistics market in Germany and scale to the European Union (EU) with an app that optimizes supply chain by preventing deviations from the route and minimizing accidents due to drivers’ exhaustion.
• Now, truck drivers can build an optimal route from point A to point B and search for parking options with necessary amenities across 10,000+ locations in just 10 seconds.

The customer

Based in Germany, the customer is a technology-driven venture capital company. To date, its global portfolio of successful ventures spans 20+ software solutions for transportation, healthcare, telecom, tourism, etc.

The need

The company had a mobile app for incity car parking that aggregated parking locations by means of an API. The customer saw an opportunity in reusing this API to deliver a similar solution for intercity truck drivers and enter the freight transportation market in Germany.

Under the logistics process, truck drivers have strict timing to reach the destination and a schedule of regular breaks to rest. Inability to find a parking lot with necessary amenities along the route may affect driver’s performance and safety, as well as result in missed deadlines and an interrupted supply chain.

Together with Altoros, the company wanted to prototype a mobile app that would enable truck drivers to build an optimal route and ease the search of parking lots in real time. As the customer was to pitch the app to the investors in 2 months, the prototype had to be delivered under tight deadlines.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

• The existing API had to process large amounts of data from different sources—route details, parking lots available across 10,000+ locations, etc. However, the API could not sustain the load and hit time-out errors.
• Having been satisfied with Mapbox on previous projects, the customer decided to reemploy the tool for building the route. When displaying available parking lots, though, Mapbox merged the detected spots in a single pin on the map. This way, it was impossible to distinguish between stand-alone vehicle parks.

The solution

Engineers at Altoros developed a prototype that facilitates the search of parking lots for trucks in real time. Users can build a route from point A to point B according to their schedule, set the remaining driving time before a break, and search for nearby parking options along the route. The app estimates parking occupancy and indicates a low/medium/high probability that a driver will reach a parking lot at a set time span.

In route details, truck drivers can see the remaining driving time and distance toward a parking lot and act accordingly. In parking details, drivers can also learn about a total parking capacity, as well as the services available: a shop, a petrol station, a hotel, a WC, etc.

Our developers analyzed various approaches to reducing the load on the API and eliminating time-out errors. After thorough consideration, team at Altoros enabled the app to search within an optimal radius of 3 km. This allowed for narrowing down the search and preventing those deviations from the route that may disrupt the schedule. Furthermore, it had a positive effect on performance with only 10 seconds to get the search results.

In addition, our engineers employed Retrofit to automate API integration with the mobile app and eliminate manual efforts.

After identifying the bottlenecks that did not allow for displaying multiple parking spots as separate pins, developers at Altoros adjusted the necessary Mapbox parameters and mitigated the issue.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer prototyped a mobile app that helps truck drivers to find an optimal parking spot in just 10 seconds. With the working prototype, the company managed to raise additional funding for further growth in just 2 months after the project kick-off. Thanks to the investment, the customer is extending the app’s functionality, such as adding online booking of parking lots via the mobile app.

Now, the organization can enter the intercity freight transportation market in Germany with a view to expand to the EU market. By facilitating the search of parking lots, logistics companies will be able to safeguard the supply chain from missed deadlines due to deviations from the route and minimize accidents due to exhaustion of drivers.