Solutions for innovation in mobility

The effects of traffic congestion cost more than 1 percent of the Global GDP, as found by McKinsey. This is just one of the economic, environmental and social challenges at play in the mobility sector. With the help of data and Google Cloud solutions, a range of actors in the mobility industry tries to tackle these challenges. The case studies below will set out the measures that Acciona Mobility, Kings Transport and Digital Mobility have taken on this road.

The WHO found transport to be one of the main sources of air pollution and the fastest-growing source of carbon emissions. This insight drastically influenced the mission of the Spanish company Acciona Mobility. To reduce carbon emissions and city congestion, Acciona provided clients with the opportunity to rent electric scooters. These scooters, powered by 100% renewable energy, can be rented through a mobile app on a pay-per-minute basis. 

At the time of the implementation of this service, Acciona was already a Google Cloud partner. This enabled the company to take big steps in the development of a reliable application, that could handle the big amounts of data that were needed. Given the scale of the project, Acciona decided to use BigQuery to warehouse the primary data. The use of BigQuery enabled the company to dynamically use multiple cloud-based analytics solutions, helping them to derive more value from the data.

Since Acciona is dealing with privacy-sensitive information, data protection is an important topic. Google Cloud Armor was implemented as an excellent solution to help protect the app against both cyber breaches and DDoS-attacks. This helps the app to run uninterrupted and protect users’ data.

King Transport is an Australian organisation that focuses on on-demand courier, taxi trucks and business fleet services. With a growing consumer demand for e-commerce logistic providers, King Transport is under pressure to attract and retain customers with faster services at lower costs. 

 As a transport company, Kings Transport generates a large amount of data concerning specific transports, route planning, invoicing and much more. To become more cost-effective King Transport was looking to derive more value from this data. This development was, however, hindered by the company’s aging on-premise datacenter. To solve this problem, King Transport partnered with Google Cloud. 

King Transport's existing legacy applications were migrated using Migrate for Compute Engine, which helped move the applications without any impact on the customers. To ensure regulatory compliance and a minimal latency, the choice was made to use the regional Google data center. 

Another challenge for King Transport was to make sure all data streams between the different departments were in sync. To achieve this King Transport decided to use the Cloud Storage service. This solution enabled the organisation to seamlessly integrate other Cloud products such as BigQuery. Next to these possibilities, the organisation was not stuck in a service plan and would only have to pay for the storage they actually needed.

As a prominent national start-up in Sri Lanka, Digital Mobility Solutions Lanka Ltd offers a mobile taxi-hailing application called PickMe. With the application available across both iOS and Android and a large fleet of manned vehicles, PickMe aimed to lead the local market. After achieving this position in ride-hailing the organisation wanted to touch all areas of mobility, such as food delivery and logistics. 

 The choice to partner with Google in this journey was made due to the high availability and scalability of Google Cloud. PickMe already used Google Maps Platform to indicate PickMe users' locations. Combining this application with Directions API allowed PickMe to efficiently calculate the directions and timings for every possible route. The virtual machines of PickMe are running in Compute Engine to provide rapid response and lower servicing costs. 

As set out in the article, new environmental and economical challenges arise in the mobility industry. Tackling these complex issues can be made actionable through technology. By continuing to innovate, Google Cloud’s technology can help you to face these challenges and make the world more mobile!