Connected Cars: Build Transportation Management and Dispatch Apps

Vehicles are getting smarter. From personal cars, to delivery services, to taxis, the number of connected vehicles on the road is growing exponentially, and is showing no signs of slowing down.

Connected cars require realtime signaling for effective dispatch and tracking. However, vehicles constantly change networks and cell towers, lose connectivity, and drop dedicated network connections. We at PubNub wanted to make this realtime signaling easy, so we’re pleased to announce the release of our Connected Car Solution Kit.

What’s Inside the Connected Car Solution Kit?

It provides the key building blocks for you to deliver scalable, realtime transportation management and dispatch applications, including taxi, fleet management and delivery service. Built on our global data stream network, the kit addresses the inherent challenges posed by connected vehicles, ensuring reliable, realtime message streaming and other key services like dispatch, location tracking, diagnostics and more.

PubNub is ready for just about anything the road throws at it: tunnels, canyons, bad weather, dropped network connections. How? PubNub automatically detects and re-establishes dropped connections, with all messages tracked and time-stamped to the nearest nanosecond to ensure that each vehicle receives missed messages upon reconnection.

Here’s what else the solution kit offers:

• Reliable connectivity – Maintains persistent mobile network connections with vehicles, regardless of network issues, as well as auto-detection and rapid “catch-up” of messages if a vehicle is temporarily disconnected.
• Location tracking – Provides a realtime map view of all vehicle locations by streaming location data from each vehicle for delivery or arrival information.
• Dispatch – Responds to transportation demand in realtime by managing messaging and response between vehicles and dispatch.
• Vehicle state– Delivers a realtime view of fleet status and availability by detecting when vehicles are available, booked, fully-loaded and other status.
• Geo fencing – Trigger actions and alerts based on vehicle location and geographic boundaries (e.g. only vehicles within five miles get dispatch requests, customized traffic alerts, etc.).

Connected Car Use Cases

GetTaxi

PubNub is already used by many transportation applications, including GetTaxi’s global taxi dispatch solution which uses PubNub to differentiate their offering: “Following our launch in NY, we’ve had many comments on the strength and reliability of the technology behind GetTaxi when compared to other consumer dispatch apps,” said Shahar Waiser, founder and CEO of GetTaxi. “Much of that strength can be attributed to the partnership we have with PubNub and their realtime data streams, storage, reliability and security infrastructure features.”

Ford AppLink

At VentureBeat’s DevBeat conference earlier this year, PubNub took home gold at the Ford Motor Co.’s Makeathon. PubNub’s Geremy Cohen built a realtime dispatch app on PubNub and Ford AppLink, providing realtime location tracking and notification via mobile phone to a car’s dashboard. The app is plugged into the dashboard of the car, and the driver can easily accept/reject the ride using the buttons on their steering wheel. Geremy specifically used PubNub to manage the distribution of data from customers to taxi drivers.

Connected Car Resources

• Press Release
• Connected Car Solution Kit

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