By: Tom Sexton
Even before I joined our Transportation and Logistics team, I was particularly excited about the capabilities the Mapbox platform brings to the industry. Whether you track shipments, rental fleets, bicycle couriers, or taxi cabs, the recurring themes are fast maps for real-time tracking, cross-platform integration, precise ETAs, map matching and geofencing. Here’s a look at five building blocks we offer to enable your asset tracking application:
1. Fast maps: display assets in real time
Speed and clarity of representation matter. We solve the difficult problem of displaying huge numbers of mobile assets at once on a map while keeping the frame rate fast. This saves valuable human operator time and decreases the likelihood of errors stemming from inaccurate or lagging representation. Check out this example of dispatching couriers in real time:
2. Cross-platform integration
Increasingly, assets aren’t managed solely from operations centers on stationary dashboards but by employees on the go. Our maps are available for web, iOS, and Android, allowing operators to monitor and direct assets from anywhere. The ability to integrate mobile also opens the possibility of tying asset tracking directly into in-app navigation for driver apps.
3. Distance & ETAs: Are we there yet?
Understanding travel time on a map is fundamental. This is where Mapbox ETAs (Estimated Times of Arrival) come into the picture. We build our ETAs and real-time traffic from more than 200 million miles of anonymized telemetry data that’s collected daily from applications running our maps. This massive amount of speed data gives us continuously updated ETAs that are measurably more accurate than any other travel time data in the market.
Explore actual travel times for a passenger vehicle in London in the example below. Here we’re combining the Mapbox Matrix API and visualization capabilities of our Mapbox GL JS API for the web to represent ETAs as isochrones.
4. Map matching: clean up and enrich GPS data
GPS traces collected from vehicles are noisy and lack any specific geospatial context. With our Map Matching API, you can match a vehicle trace to the road network giving you a clean, lightweight trace to display on a map. Additionally, map matching will provide the precise street names traversed by the vehicles and the realtime speeds along the way, for instance, for driver management.
5. Geofencing: trigger actions when entering/leaving areas
Geofencing — virtual boundaries around geographic areas — unlocks location-aware automation, such as triggering a charge when entering a toll zone, automating check-ins when a truck approaches a warehouse, or deploying drivers to a location of high demand.
The example below tracks vehicles entering the downtown London congestion zone and tallies up fees incurred for all trips:
Let’s talk
Learn more or drop me a line at tom.sexton@mapbox.com to start the conversation.
Asset Tracking for Transportation & Logistics was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.