Logistics & Mobility// topic
Telematics and the live vehicle data plane
In short
Where vehicle position and state actually come from — phone-as-sensor versus installed hardware, ping frequency and cost, geofences, and how to store and render a live map that stays honest at fleet scale.
9 pages
diagnostics
- Arrival fired twice at the gate, and forty minutes late at the next stopDuplicate arrivals and late arrivals look like one flaky feature and are 3 unrelated faults. Replaying the raw pings for one bad arrival against the polygon tells you which one you have in about ten minutes.diagnostic11 min
- Eleven vehicles have not moved since morning, and the fleet is fineA subset of stale vehicles is almost never a platform outage. Bucketing every vehicle by the age of its newest position, then looking for what the stale set has in common, names the fault in about ten minutes.diagnostic10 min
- The map is open, the vehicles have stopped moving, and the data is fineOne query decides it. If the newest position row for a frozen vehicle is seconds old and the marker says 14 minutes, the fault is in front of the database and nothing in the ingest path will fix it.diagnostic11 min
- The vehicle has been parked since Friday and it has driven nine kilometresPhantom mileage is not a bug in the map. It is stationary noise being added up by a distance calculation that cannot subtract, and the fix is a filter stack — accuracy, state and displacement together, in that order.diagnostic9 min
definitions
- Breadcrumb trail: the line driven, not the line plannedThe trail is what the vehicle reported. The route line is what someone intended. Quoting one when you mean the other is how a mileage or detention dispute gets lost.definition6 min
- Geofence: a zone, 3 triggers, and the hysteresis that stops it lyingA zone on a map is not a geofence. It becomes one when a trigger rule and a hysteresis policy are attached, and without the second it fires whenever a parked vehicle's fix wanders.definition6 min
- Ignition on and off: 1 true signal and its 4 false versionsEvery telematics feed carries an ignition flag. Whether it means the engine is running depends on how it was obtained, and the field itself almost never says.definition6 min
- Map matching: snapping a scatter of fixes onto the right roadMap matching converts a scatter of position fixes into a path along real road segments. The distance that comes out is not the distance you get by joining the fixes.definition6 min
- The 8 fields in a position report, and the 2 that make it trustworthyA coordinate pair on its own proves almost nothing. The 8 fields around it decide whether a position is evidence, and 2 of them decide whether the other 6 can be believed.definition6 min
Other topics in Logistics & Mobility
See allRouting, dispatch and optimisationThe planning problem itself: capacity and time windows, live traffic, mid-day re-optimisation, and the dispatcher screen where an optimiser's output either gets used or gets overridden.7 pagesETA prediction and shipment visibilityWhat the person waiting is told, and how wrong it is allowed to be — ETA models, confidence, exception alerts, tracking pages, and the difference between a promised window and an observed one.1 page
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