An AWS-Based IoT System for Automated Fleet Management

About the Client

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

Per-Device SaaS Fees Made Third-Party Fleet Platforms Too Costly at Scale

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, those platforms charged for each of the Client's IoT devices separately, and once the Client's customer base grew to over 2,000 firms with 26,500+ IoT devices, the subscription costs increased sharply. The Client therefore decided to develop a custom fleet management solution that would be far more cost-effective in the long term.

A Custom, AWS-Hosted Fleet Management System Built MVP-First

In 2019, the Client commissioned INNERLUXES, a fleet management software developer with 12 years of experience in IoT, to build its new fleet management solution. In 2020, INNERLUXES'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 connected via Bluetooth. The system consumes, stores, and processes data from the sensors, and users can access the processed data via web and mobile apps.

To ensure quicker payback, INNERLUXES started by delivering an MVP. Already at that stage, the Client was able to move the users who needed only the features the MVP covered from the SaaS platforms to the custom solution, reducing subscription fees. After that, the team continuously improved the solution's functionality and added new features according to the Client's requirements.

The project team has implemented the following functionality so far:

• Real-time and historical tracking — GPS trackers collect data about events (for example, stops), geo zone, speed, mileage, and vehicle location. This data is presented as dashboards or reports.
• Maintenance management — automated reminders about the need to perform vehicle maintenance based on the date of previous maintenance, a vehicle's mileage, or engine running time. The solution also enables vehicle maintenance cost tracking.
• Document management — tracking the validity of permissions, driving licenses, and other fleet-related documents, and generating alerts when they are about to expire.
• Forms management — creating and filling out inspection forms on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, and 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 (for example, time of refill, fuel type, driver) and reporting on such data.
• Driver scoring — the solution analyzes driver behavior (for example, harsh braking, acceleration or cornering, excessive idling, overspeeding) and provides a total score per driver to evaluate driving quality.
• Instant messaging via a mobile app that enables communication between 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 three front-end developers, 4.5 FTEs of PHP developers, and one DevOps engineer. iOS and Android developers join the project to update the corresponding mobile apps when the need arises.

The DevOps engineer takes great care to ensure the solution's scalability at reasonable cost, continuously monitoring the load across all the AWS services used. If the load approaches the limits within a given AWS service, the engineer manually adds resources.

A Cost-Effective, Scalable Fleet Product Supporting Thousands of Devices

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 INNERLUXES and continues cooperation to further enrich the product's functionality. As of December 2022, the team is implementing billing functionality through 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 card and bank transfer.

Technologies and Tools

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

Front end: Angular.

Back end: PHP, Symfony, PostgreSQL.