Success Story
About the Client
Chalo is a public transport tracking application that provides real-time location updates of public vehicles through a mobile app. It enables users to view the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) for services such as buses, metro trains, and inter-city trains. The application has been deployed across more than 15,000 public transport vehicles in 17 cities throughout India, helping commuters plan their journeys efficiently and choose the most optimal route to reach their destination on time.
Business Situation & Requirements
As the organization expanded its smart mobility services across multiple cities and transport operators, it struggled to provide reliable, real-time visibility into fleet movements. Data coming from different GPS vendors and vehicle systems was inconsistent, delayed, and difficult to integrate, leading to inaccuracies in tracking, routing, and customer-facing applications.
Accurate routing to the correct ports and IPs was difficult, and manual configuration risked errors. Automation was essential to ensure reliable, scalable, and real-time data processing across all devices.
The client needed a middleware solution to ingest GPS data from public transport vehicles and convert it into a standardized format.
To overcome these challenges, Team Unthinkable had to:
Accurately identified and mapped ports for data originating from multiple GPS protocols, ensuring error-free data transfer and reliable device-to-server communication.
Automated protocol detection and routing logic to eliminate manual configuration and reduce the risk of human error.
Maintained 99.9% system uptime to support uninterrupted real-time data delivery, where even a five-second delay could impact operational usability.
Engineered a resilient middleware layer capable of handling both real-time and batch-based GPS data transmissions.
Built a real-time monitoring dashboard to provide operators with end-to-end visibility into data flow between GPS devices and backend systems.
Implemented alerting and health checks to proactively detect data drops, transmission failures, or performance anomalies.
Solution
Unthinkable developed a robust middleware application to power real-time public transport intelligence for Chalo at scale. The solution parses high-volume data from over 15,000 GPS devices, each operating on different transmission protocols, and converts it into a standardized JSON format for downstream consumption. This unified data layer enables accurate ETA calculations for the Chalo mobile app while simultaneously supporting operational visibility for public transport authorities across multiple cities.
To ensure reliability, transparency, and uninterrupted data flow, Unthinkable also built a centralized monitoring dashboard used by operators and administrators across more than 40 cities. The platform not only validates device communication and data freshness in real time but also supports seamless scalability, allowing Chalo to onboard new cities, devices, and partners without code changes or operational disruption.
Once a GPS device is configured, the dashboard displays the following information:
Standardized GPS Data Processing at Scale
The middleware ingests and normalizes data from thousands of GPS devices operating on diverse protocols into a consistent JSON format. This ensures accurate, real-time location data for ETA predictions in the Chalo app while enabling seamless data consumption by operators and partner systems, regardless of device type, transmission frequency, or geographic location.
Real-Time Device Monitoring and Data Health Visibility
A centralized dashboard provides instant confirmation of device configuration and the server’s live communication status. Clear visual indicators highlight data freshness, green for active devices, yellow for delayed or invalid data, and red for no transmission, allowing operators to detect and resolve issues before they impact service reliability quickly.
Comprehensive Vehicle and Device Insights
Operators gain real-time visibility into every connected vehicle and GPS device, including live location mapping, device ID, vehicle number, last tracked position, packet status, and latitude-longitude details. The dashboard also maps devices to specific vehicles, displaying SIM details, network providers, and active device counts for complete operational transparency.
Cloud Backup for Analytics and Operational Efficiency
All raw GPS data is securely stored on AWS, providing a backup for historical analysis. Public transport operators and the Chalo team leverage this data to calculate distance traveled per vehicle, track device activity, monitor healthy devices, and analyze vehicle movement, enabling better configuration, accurate driver/conductor incentives, and improved operational efficiency.
The Impact
With Unthinkable as their technology partner, Chalo parses data from over 15,000 GPS devices into a standardized format. The middleware updates users with real-time public transport information by processing location packets sent every 5 seconds.
The dashboard provides operators with live vehicle details, including number, last arrival, delay, packet status, and coordinates. Built on Unthinkable’s Architecture Framework, the system ensures high performance, scalability, and minimal technical debt as Chalo expands.
15,000+
GPS Devices Data To Be Streamlined
99.9%
System Uptime
<2
seconds Average Ping Time From GPS Devices
