A Vehicle Tracking and Trip Cost Estimation Mobile App

An iOS app for trip cost estimation
An original electric power/fuel consumption algorithm
Demo and real-time modes

Expertise

Mobility

Verticals

ISV

Logistics

In under three months, Iflexion developed and tested an iOS vehicle tracking mobile app for a UK-based innovative company to help them promote emission-free driving.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Solution
Technologies
Results

Context

Our customer is an innovative electric vehicle (EV) technology provider for private and commercial vehicles from 2.5 to 26 GWT, including trucks and buses, with the goal to render cars emission-free and thus more environmentally friendly.

To promote the use of their EV technology, the company launched a vehicle tracking mobile app on the Android platform, allowing users to calculate the trip cost advantages of electricity and hybrid power over fuel in real time.

As Android app development was nearing the end, the company decided to complement this app with an iOS version to broaden their reach. For this, the automotive tech provider turned to Iflexion, recognizing our niche expertise in logistics software development and ability to meet a tight deadline in just three months.

Solution

We started the project with our iOS developers reconstructing and formalizing the project requirements as those were missing, as well as with outlining the scope of custom mobile app development. The project implied our team’s proactive role in building up the app as the customer only supplied UI design elements and access to the Android app codebase for reference.

The resulting iOS application is based on an advanced power/fuel consumption algorithm built from scratch and real-time vehicle geolocation tracking, which allow users to estimate trip costs and compare them to other power types, such as pure-electric, hybrid and fuel-only options.

Key Features

Uninterrupted location tracking. We designed the app in such a way that made it possible to collect a user’s vehicle location updates when the app is both active and pushed in the background.
Trip modes. There are two modes available in the app: a demo mode, where the geolocation data is pulled from the local database to simulate a trip, and a real-life mode, where the app uses the connected vehicle’s current geolocation data for calculations. All real-life trips are saved in the History tab.
Real-time trip cost calculation and comparison. Once the user chooses their vehicle power type and enters the electricity and fuel price per unit in their region in the settings, the app applies the built-in power/fuel consumption algorithm, which was developed based on real-world tests, to calculate the trip cost.
User settings. This tab allows changing vehicle parameters to estimate power/fuel consumption depending on the benchmark data entered.

In parallel with our iOS development team, Iflexion’s mobile QA engineers joined the project to deliver software quality testing of both the iOS and Android versions of the solution. They executed end-to-end mobile app tests to ensure the final product could satisfy both the app marketplace guidelines and users’ expectations.

Technologies

The app is structured following the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architectural pattern, with some enhancements to the traditional MVC model made to assure optimized interaction between the model (the data repository) and the view (the interactive user interface) components.

The iOS app was developed with a range of Apple Developer tools, such as UIKit for UI design and Core Location for enabling geolocation tracking.

The custom-built power/fuel consumption algorithm was designed following selected behavioral design patterns according to the acknowledged GOF framework:

The State pattern automates location tracking data management.
The Strategy pattern carries out power/fuel consumption calculations.
The Template pattern enables power/fuel consumption calculations per engine.
The Visitor pattern delivers data to integrated objects.

The complete set of technologies that were used on the project looks as follows:

Results

In just three months, Iflexion’s iOS developers delivered a vehicle tracking mobile app that allows automating trip cost calculations for different power modes, including electricity, hybrid and fuel. Based on the proprietary power/fuel consumption algorithm, the app illustrates the cost advantages of electric vehicles over those running on fuel, and helps the UK EV technology provider promote their emission-free cars to a broader audience.

Screenshots

WANT TO START A PROJECT?

It’s simple!