Convenient shuttle
bus service

Issues and solution

Transportation has become a major issue in Vietnam cities due to the rapid increase (36%) in urbanization. With its slow, unairconditioned, overcrowded public transport, commuters living in the suburbs were left with only 3 other alternatives: personal cars, motorbikes and taxis.

Minimum viable product MVP

Before investing a considerable amount of money in building software, hiring personnel and acquiring minibuses, GoDee wanted to develop an MVP to understand the market fit potential.

Although services such as GoDee exist in other parts of the world, simulating these programs in Ho Chi Minh City was pointless because the city’s commuting culture is quite different. That’s why user feedback was crucial to its improvement and key to its current rapid growth.

Development goals

Intelligent management panel

GoDee's rapid growth since its early stages required easy-to-scale business processes and automated route management. Although, in theory, everything can be done with an army of sales representatives and route operators, GoDee wanted to automate routine operations so it could expand to other cities and countries.

One manager and one customer support representative can manage more than ~2500 trip requests per month and ~25,000 passengers per month.

Smart route planning

How can we create profitable yet convenient user routes?

Let users send trip requests and tell you what works for them. This feature was available initially through the MVP phase, and it enables GoDee route managers to build effective routes by understanding real commuter demand.

Inside the transportation application, users can submit a trip request with pick-up and drop-off locations at the desired time. The request is added to the list on the managers' dashboard.

Trips Monitor

The Trips Monitor feature enables operators to track every bus in real time and collect data on late or early arrivals. More importantly, the operator can contact drivers or passengers quickly if necessary.

The Trips Monitor dashboard displays the following information:

1. Drivers' locations on mini map in real-time
2. Late and early departures of buses
3. Complete bus schedule weeks in advance
4. Notice to driver that a GoDee client has not been picked up at a bus stop
5. Number of passengers assigned to each stop and driver
6. Historical information through filters

Route optimization

With the help of detailed drivers' performance data, Mad Devs’ Pifia microservice enables route managers to optimize ETA (estimated time of arrival). Pifia shows more accurate arrival and departure times with just one click.

Examples of early and late departure times: If Pifia determines that a minibus is usually late due to increased traffic at 5:35 pm and not 5:30 pm, it alerts the route manager to shift the arrival time to 5:35 pm. Five minutes might sound minor, but these small optimizations add up.

The infrastructure is hosted on the Digital Ocean developer cloud.

Our applications send requests to the Nginx server, and then they are processed via the gRPC framework and each application is addressed to separate APIs. These APIs refer to Redis quick-caching Streams and the Georeferencing service, which allows bus drivers to be on track along their routes.

Then all information, collected and processed by these services, is controlled via the Web Admin panel, which is connected to the PostgreSQL database, OSRM, Firebase and push notification services. We use Docker containers throughout the development process.

Technology stack

• Open Street Map

• Google Maps

• PostgreSQL

• Docker

• Nginx

• Redis

• Python (Django)

• Golang

• Kotlin

• Atlassian

• Swift

• Firebase

• TestFlight

• Datadog

• Android

• Suite

• Jira Software

• GRPC

• iOS

• UptimeRobot

• Mapbox

• Vue JS

• Sentry

• Here Traffic

• Basecamp

Monitoring

We believe that every production system requires proper monitoring. For this purpose, we use the Datadog service, which allows us to discover possible issues before they affect our users.

Here is an example of our monitoring configuration for the GoDee project:

Stable & Scalable solution

Transportation and logistics software has zero tolerance to downtime. Imagine hundreds of passengers not being able to book their tickets, drivers not knowing where to pick up/drop off passengers or operators seeing empty screens.

GoDee’s microservice architecture and the quality of the solution make it easy for each Mad Devs developer to deploy new features without causing spikes in downtime. On top of this, 75% of code is covered by various tests and has detailed documentation and pull requests. GoDee's business model greatly benefits from economies of scale. Thus, increased demand from Ho Chi Minh citizens is backed up by GoDee's unchanging low cost for infrastructure.

Impact

GoDee faced the challenge of changing people’s habits. To grow the user base, we needed to create an extremely helpful and hassle-free solution that offers an alternative to expensive taxis and inconvenient motorbikes. It was also key that it be predictable, affordable and ‘green’ by design.