Real-Time Traffic Services for Automotive Giants

Business challenge

A global vendor of mapping data and mapping solutions, our client was among the first to commercialize API-driven real-time traffic management system that rely on vehicle sensor data. Their solution accumulates billions of GPS data points, feeds from dozens of incident sources, and vehicle sensor data from millions of cars of multiple makers.

Among their A-list customers who pay for real-time traffic feeds are the world’s largest players in the technology, automotive, GIS, and navigation industries, as well as governments and municipalities. As an innovator in geospatial technology, our client is directly contributing to the connected autonomous future by providing cars a rich picture of the road.

For years, our client had been offering traffic management services to third parties through two major public APIs – one standard and one customer-specific that was tailored to the requirements of a leading US automaker. Our client had a separate development team dealing with each API. But with an increase in data volumes plus new features and new data vendors, this approach proved too costly and complex to maintain.
Our client decided to merge their public APIs into a single one while enhancing quality, backward compatibility, and performance. Cooperating with the client on several pivotal programs, experienced Intellias engineers took responsibility for carrying out the merge.

Technology solution

The API merge called for migrating all development, testing, and delivery environments from the US to the German office. Until the migration was complete, the existing staging and production environments needed to be properly maintained and updated to retain business continuity and a high level of customer service.

Our collaboration started with knowledge transfer and elaboration of technical aspects of the migration and merge plan. Then we migrated the entire traffic data processing and API codebase, including the subscriber API, TMC-RDS services (traffic alerts through FM radio networks), and internal solutions. Further important milestones included moving all SoapUI test cases to a proprietary traffic automation test framework and comparing the coverage of existing test cases against required functionality. The final challenge was merging all continuous integration and delivery environments into our infrastructure.

Continuing this successful cooperation, Intellias has taken ownership of the entire navigation real time traffic data processing and API program. We’re now the sole contact point for design, quality control, development, deployment, and support.

With such rich expertise and commitment, it’s no wonder that Intellias has managed to extend collaboration with this client to other work streams, where we have:

• extended our client’s core team to implement solutions for rendering traffic flow layers for routing
• developed an automation mechanism that eliminates the need to manually update maps in case software changes are incompatible with older versions
• implemented support for predictive traffic feeds that enable traffic forecasts based on real-time and historical traffic flow data
• integrated a new location reference standard, OpenLR, that makes reliable cross-referencing possible with maps from different vendors

In terms of quality control, we built a full end-to-end performance evaluation framework from the ground up to run synthetic tests. The framework allows client applications to measure the performance impact on different product parts when pumping increased amounts of traffic input data. Our focus on quality also complemented the implementation of healthcheck monitors for the existing traffic flow rendering service.

Business impact

Our collective accomplishments reflect the effort, expertise, and management excellence that Intellias has invested into our client’s software production process. We’ve already successfully released the first version of the merged traffic data API with enhanced performance and stability.

Recently, our Intellias team became the dedicated engineering partner in charge of specific traffic data and an API used by a US auto giant. Our team directly communicates with the automaker’s teams and covers all development and release management tasks.

We helped our customer

• Save $100K+ USD annually by optimizing AWS costs
• Expand traffic coverage to East Asia and Baltic regions, bringing coverage to 60+ countries
• Diversify their product offering to target new customers and sell more to existing customers, including to global technology companies and automotive giants
• Increase the accuracy of navigation with real time traffic data, encouraging drivers to rely more on car navigation than on news reports before long drives
• Take a step toward autonomous driving by bringing up-to-date traffic data and analytics to automotive IoT