Summary

This is a brief continuation of our previously written writeup: PSS Vantec Japanese Voice Skill Design. Vantec is a global logistics company that is now visualizing all of their truck data on custom built CARTO dashboards that we build for Truck Loads, Day Comparisons, Animated travel patterns, and real time pubsub vehicle locations. We have been able to grow our skills in building custom dashboards for Vector Tiles as well as a new PubSub mapping engine to interact with various geospatial database sources.

Problem and Solution

The project sought the building and improvement of four major dashboards, that are composed of the following:

1. Realtime Pub/Sub map dashboard
   • Move truck symbols in near real-time
   • Filter data
   • Show KPI and current time
2. Truck load dashboard
   • Show historic data and analyze truck loads
   • Use cluster map
   • Filter data with widgets
3. Truck animation dashboard
   • Show historic trajectories of trucks
   • Animated map
   • Filter data with widgets
4. Data loader
   • Sample GPS point to achieve quick visual response

Vantec sought to either add or improve the following items on their dashboard:

1. Add or modify a way to filter date and time
2. Adding infowindow and disaggregate cluster points to investigate each data points
   • Vantec wants to see data within clusters. So if they see a big red cluster (low truck load), they want to understand why it is happening there.
3. Adding a capability to filter data by drawing a rectangular area
   • Vantect wants to add a filter function by drawing a rectangular area on a map.
4. Adding a capability to filter data by locate a point and add a diameter from the point
   • Similar to the former rectangular filter, using a center location and diameter instead.
5. Add office names (and maybe driver names) as a category widget.
6. Add interactivity on each widget.

Specific Efforts

Not only did we work to add the aforementioned items, Xentity also provided Testing & Documentation. We also designed a document containing a guide on setup and use of the service along with samples of how the software works. We used NodeJS Server Codes and JavaScript libraries for Google Maps

Outcome and Benefits

Through these efforts, Xentity accomplished the following:

• Developed a light pub/sub system that can handle around 5k moving vehicles needing to be updated approximately every minute on a Google map.
• The service can handle 50 concurrent users via web sockets.
• It is dynamic enough to support additional pub/sub channels with different data changing.
• Built a Realtime PubSub Dashboard based on the Vantec Pub/Sub Layers defined in other PSS contracts.
• Built Truck Load Dashboard that will show historic data and analyze truck loads including map visualizations and filter widgets
• Built Truck Animation Dashboard that will show historic trajectories of trucks via animated maps, filter and visual widgets
• Provided a Data Loader solution that will migrate GPS data from MSSQL to CARTO for visualizations