Happening at Pilotfish
Svealandstrafiken – a digital front runner
Svealandstrafiken, a public transport operator that serves Västmandland and Örebro county, is in the forefront of vehicle fleet digitalization. Busforce recently had a chat with them about digitalization.
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Pilotfish and Voith at UITP
The UITP summit was a great opportunity for Pilotfish to develop relationships, both old and new ones. We shared booth with Voith, which gave good opportunities to strengthen our alliance and communicate our strategic partnership.
New coworkers
This week, we got four new coworkers at Pilotfish.
Marie Persson and Johan Helsing are Java developers. They are both fresh from school. Jonathan has studied at Chalmers, Marie has studied at University of Gothenburg. Julie Lamarre who will work with sales has five years of experience in sales of SaaS. Marzieh Rostaei is an Embedded developer, with a Bachelor’s Degree in computer engineering at Azad University in Teheran, more than a year of courses at University of Gothenburg and almost 7 years work experience as a developer and tester in both Sweden and Iran. Marzieh is already out visiting customers, so she couldn’t attend the photo op.
We want to welcome you all to the company!
Procuring a Vehicle Communication Platform
Busforce recently posted an article about procuring a communication platform for vehicles. When you do, you very seldom start from scratch. So, you need to make a review of what you have and decide what you can keep and what needs to be replaced.
RIO Award to Carl Malmström
Every quarter, Pilotfish issues a reward to one of our coworkers, who in a good way has embodied the Pilotfish RIO values. The motivation for giving Carl the award is following:
Carl is very open to help others. He always does something extra to benefit the recipient, and he delivers professionally and fast.
Congratulations Carl!
The Pilotfish RIO values:
Reliable
- Our systems are technically and operationally stable. Uptime is high and our customers can trust our employees and our organisation.
- We are a part of an important value chain and our link is reliable and stable.
Innovative
- We aim to be Innovative not only today but also in the long run.
- We invest in innovation in order to best supply our customers.
Open
- We are open in our communications with our partners and customers in order to offer the best technology and standards.
- We base our offering on open technologies and standards.
Spring review
Development from last few weeks
This section sums up the technical development from Pilotfish from the last few weeks.Total Fuel Consumption
A new indexed field for Total Fuel Consumption was added to our data model. The Total Fuel Consumption is read from FMS and is the accumulated amount of fuel consumed by the vehicle during its lifetime. The data is reported from the Vehicle Gateway several times a day.
Improved presentation of approximated odometer
In the Wanda web portal, if the odometer value comes from FMS or the Tachograph it’s displayed with a solid black font color, whereas when it’s calculated from GPS it will show as greyed out with a dotted line. The dotted line will show a popup help text when hovered over with the cursor. Previously we showed a red text when the odometer value came from GPS or Tachograph, implying that the Tachograph value is approximated or inferior in some way, which is not the case.
Fine tuning of Alcolock bypass alarm
There has been a number of improvements to the Alcolock bypass alarm to avoid false alarms. Fixes includes smarter calculations of GPS values and using the D+ signal (engine generator signal) for triggering the alarm for vehicles without FMS.
Extended messaging REST API
For customers to use their own messaging system when communicating with drivers we extended our Messaging REST API so that external parties can send and receive messages. E.g. when a traffic controller want to send a message to a driver, this can be done by integration towards our REST API. The message will then show in the driver console in the vehicle.
Collecting FMS metadata from Vehicles
Information about what FMS parameters that are available for a vehicle is collected and sent to the back office, where the data is indexed and placed in a database for future analysis. This is useful for customers with many different bus models in their fleet, and want to know what FMS parameters are available across the entire fleet or a subset.
Pre-study on integration between Hogia VJS with Pilotfish Routeplanner
Looking into what the possibilities are if an integration between Pilotfish’s Routeplanner and Hogia’s Vehicle Journey Service should be made. Some of the manual work that is done in the Routeplanner when planning bus lines and detours is already done in Hogias system. If the route information could be shared between the platforms a manual step could be replaced by an automatic verification.
New deployment process, single versioned releases
We have streamlined how we build and deploy software releases, making it easier to maintain and also makes it possible to provide a global version number for all combinations of services. This global version number will further be used in bug reports and forwarded to external parties for handling version compatibility.
Data replay tool
An internal tool for replaying recorded data streams recorded by the Pilotfish Vehicle Data Recorder, to mimic an actual vehicle on a Vehicle Gateway mounted on a testbench. The tool replays data from accelerometer, GPS and FMS. This tool can be used in full stack system tests and quality assurance, as well as for demonstrations.
Fuel Economy: updated Driver list page
Our ongoing effort to update the Wanda web portal continues. This sprint we added better filtering capabilities to the driver list page, making it possible to sort and filter on all available fields. We also added functionality to display the page on smaller screens.
New GUI for route assignment
New views for selecting block, journey and line the driver makes in the vehicle. The block list is loaded from back office, and the list is filtered when typing. The driver then selects a journey from the selected block.
Predefined short messages
From the Driver Console the driver can tap on a predefined short message that will be sent to the traffic control. The list of messages can be configured in the back office. The message contains subject, body and coded data about vehicle, next bus stop, timestamp etc.
Ticket Validator GUI
A GUI for the driver to supervise tickets from within the Driver console. When a ticket is selected, detailed information of that ticket is displayed. The ticket validator is shown when the vehicle comes to a halt, e.g. at a bus stop.
MQTT integration with Azure cloud
We developed and deployed an MQTT bridge, receiving and translating between different MQTT dialects. Once translated the MQTT topics are sent to Azure Cloud, where a customer handles the received data.
Highlighted Feature
FAULT REPORTS
Automatic Fault Report
FMS and Tell-tales coming from the vehicle manufacturers interface in combination with other data such as battery status in order to create Automatic Fault Reports.
Manual Fault Report
The drivers can send fault reports, via an app that is configurable and adapted to the customers own fault reporting routines. The driver also sees an overview of what faults have been reported on that particular vehicle.