Fleet Studio, an instrument for organizing operations and vehicle management.

Consat Telematics has developed Fleet Studio: a web application for vehicle management. The application can be used on desktop or mobile phoneds and helps our customers to plan their business in many ways. The application keeps track of energy consumption, routes, real time location of vehicles, charging needs, etc.

Fleet Studio is an improved successor to Fleet Management and one of the advantages is that the customers can decide for themselves which functions the application should handle and display, in addition, you can add functions if something is missing. Everything is reported easily on different dashboards. Since the application is cloud-based, the entire application does not need to take up space in the user's device.

Consat Telematics develops and provides smart systems for public transport such as fleet management, passenger information and traffic management, for customers all over the world.

After we received a request for a web-based traffic information function, we developed the application A.T.O.M. (Advanced Traffic Operation Management), which became a platform for future further development. A.T.O.M. was used to display information regarding public transport on a dashboard in real time. The information is displayed in the form of graphs, showing how many buses are currently driving, how many are keeping their timetables, are delayed, passenger count etc.

We also wanted to examine if WebGL could be used to get real time updated maps where vehicle movements are visible on the map. To achieve this, some of the underlying functions in the Telematics Traffic Studio (Traffic Management Application) needed to be remodeled to work in A.T.O.M. and finally a clear and powerful map function could be presented, where the movements of all vehicles in traffic are displayed. The map function is very useful and can be used for traffic monitoring and traffic management. It can also show in real time how much energy a bus has left, if something on the vehicle is broken, what speed and what driving style it has, etc.

A.T.O.M has been a success and Telematics has invested in further development of the application by appointing a team with Karl Bane and Torbjörn Bäckström in the lead and Lars Larsson and Markus Ingvarsson as reinforcements. The team further developed A.T.O.M, which is now called Fleet Studio to better match Telematics' already established application Traffic Studio. Karl Bane reworked the interface and added menus, search function, lists and so on. Fleet Studio is ready for development of more features in web format who can be customized according to customers' wishes. The application was also refined to improve the user experience when used in mobile phones.

Fleet Studio has also received an add-on to be able to handle electric buses, where handling of bus charging must be included, which enables the calculation of energy consumption for the buses because the application knows the mileage and receives data from the chargers when the bus is charged. The application can record data on driving style, how often and for how long the doors open, if the vehicle has something broken, etc. It is possible to collect many kinds of data, it all depends on the customers wishes. The more data you collect, the greater the opportunities are to optimize the business through increased efficiency, reduced need of maintenance, with reduced environmental impact and ultimately increased profitability as end result.

The information is presented as two numerical values, energy consumption and passenger comfort. These values are linked together, jerkily driving with many accelerations and braking, results in an increase of energy consumtion (and an increase of wear on the road and vehicle).

The user interface has a central place in Fleet Studio, striving to be userfriendly and suit different users. In order for the user to recognize themselves, Fleet Studio is based on a proprietary framework which manages menus and dynamic content. Hence, a new report or function therefore keeps the same cut as the previous ones. It is a challenge to design the program to work both for large wall screens and for mobile screens. The trend is for things to be dynamic so that the user can use both on tablet, mobile or a big screen.

Most of the improvements introduced in Fleet Studio are based on customer feedback about Fleet Management and the new HTML application Fleet Studio can, with its flexibility, be used by a larger target group than the old Fleet Management.

There are universal goals and requirements for a flexible application like Fleet Studio. The most important parameters must be easily monitored and it should be versatile and work well in both mobile and tablet and it should be user-friendly so that all people in different professions can master it. For example, a driver should be able to log in and analyze his runs himself.

Fleet Studio is a result of committed and highly accomplished employees and has become a global success, it is already used to manage local traffic in cities around the world.