Case Study: School Bus tracking and monitoring system.
Overview: With security becoming the biggest concern among everyone – parents and schools in particular want to ensure the safety of their children when they leave home for school and till the time they return home. A Bus monitoring and security system is the need of the hour. With modern day GPS technology, the cloud, and a mobile in every hand, convenience is just an App away.
The challenge
To build the entire Software Solution, a Monitoring system for school kids in Transit. The Software was developed from scratch and interfaces with the Hardware developed by a partner IT Company (Entwine Mobisoft). The goal is to provide a user friendly interface for schools and parents to be able to monitor their children. To know, what time they boarded the bus, or alighted from? How can the schools reliably monitor the drivers and the attenders? The solution has to meet all the technical requirements with support for any future enhancements.
The value-add
Apart from supporting and maintaining the system, and making future enhancements, the value add the solution offers is obvious. It spells convenience and assurance for all involved:
For Schools
• Student Safety with Video, Intercom, and real-time locating
• Behavior monitoring of bus drivers
• Optimize Routes and save transit time and cost
• Monitor Speed real-time on a dashboard
• Various reports available to monitor route, speed violations
For Parents
• Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) Alerts to parents when bus is few minutes away from their stop
• Android Application available to know real time location of Bus.
• ETA can be disabled during their Child’s leave / vacation.
• Customize what alerts to receive and to whom
For Bus Administrators
• Ability to configure Routes as per bus routes
• Route Optimizations by plotting
• Customize Stops and students
• Monitor in live map or on status dashboard
• Review reports like Distance, Over-speed, Route Violation, Driver Merit Analysis
The solution
WidasConcepts has developed a state of the art 360⁰ Solution leveraging cloud based high availability backend servers with a highly scalable data architecture and Map based live tracking. The solution also includes a Mobile App for Parents and a handheld Device friendly User Interface for Schools.
The solution comprises of the Web Application and necessary backend data store, and is capable of:
1. Tracking the bus in real time using satellite based GPS. See useful information on the route such as stops and traffic.
2. Providing useful real time alerts to the parents and the school admin person. For e.g. when the child / boards the bus, alights from it. To know when the bus is nearing the pick-up point so that the child doesn’t have to wait for a long time, in the case of any unforeseen delays. On the same lines, to know the ETA in unpredictable traffic is an obvious advantage.
3. Settings / default configuration should be easily changeable. For e.g.: a parent may wish, to not receive alerts when the child is on leave.
4. Schools can set up routes, stops. Assign students to bus. In addition can send out bulk SMSes.
5. Different roles and corresponding access rights depending on who logs in (all, parent, school admin person).
6. Support audio/visual monitoring.
The technologies used
• Web based application running on Azure Cloud Platform, developed with Angular JS and templates, Responsive design to fit on any device
• State of the art technology backend servers to store high throughput events/facts.
• Optimized server components for performance and scaling