How Road Services Seamlessly Integrate with Transportation Management via Bosch L.OS on AWS

By Andrea Tauschmann – Bosch
By Tim Dittrich, Henrik Schulze, and Fabrizio Siciliano – Storm Reply
By Aryam Gutierrez – AWS

The logistics and transportation industry is fragmented, with more than four million different players running the global logistics economy. Most of them are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with fewer than 10 vehicles.

On the software provider side, thousands of IT systems are available to logistics service providers (LSPs) and support them in their daily business. However, there is limited supply chain transparency due to global and interconnected supply chains with a high level of complexity.

Logistics is an efficiency and cost-driven business, so digitalization and optimization play an important role. For SMEs, fragmented IT landscapes with various independent and disconnected subsystems represent the biggest challenge but also the biggest opportunity for efficiency improvements. Fleet managers and dispatchers should be able to focus on their core business and not be slowed down by inefficient and expensive customized siloed IT-solutions.

Transportation management systems (TMS) and fleet management systems (FMS) are the leading IT systems in the logistics industry, which support dispatchers in planning, execution, and optimization of the transportation of physical goods.

Current challenges, especially in the long-distance truck operation, include crowded public truck parking locations, theft while parking, and unacceptable conditions of the facilities available to drivers (sanitary installations, dining options). This can lead to financial disadvantages, exceeded driving time, and high driver dissatisfaction.

In this post, you will learn how Bosch L.OS, with the help of Storm Reply, is leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer a unified approach for the end-to-end route planning process. This fills the gap between different systems and makes the life of dispatchers easier.

Bosch is an AWS Partner and leading global supplier of technology and services that’s pursuing a vision of mobility that is sustainable, safe, and exciting. Storm Reply is part of Reply Group, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with a strong focus on cloud-native development, Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and machine learning.

Bosch L.OS Platform

Bosch L.OS is a global cloud-based service platform that facilitates easy access to solutions from different independent software vendors (ISVs). Solution categories covered via Bosch L.OS comprise digital services in the space of driver management, financial services, sustainability, as well as transportation and fleet management systems which are, as described above, the heart to run transportation businesses.

In addition to providing access to these individual solutions, the Bosch L.OS platform enables seamless integration of separated solutions by implementing a general service abstraction layer to combine various service offers from multiple platform partners. With this, TMS/FMS partners get access to a comprehensive list of different bookable road services (such as truck parking, workshops, truck wash, or hotels) or even broader conceived road services for trailer handover or CO₂ calculation via Bosch L.OS.

Without leaving the well-known TMS/FMS, the platform allows dispatchers to make use of additional features enabled with this road service integration approach. The solution is built on best-of-breed integration technology able to harmonize and support diverse services on top of a mission-critical platform hosted on AWS.

Solution Overview

As of today, the Bosch L.OS road services offering provides an easy-to-use parking management API that allows Bosch L.OS partners to consume parking services offered by parking service providers.

Leveraging this API, it’s possible to retrieve parking area information and book various parking locations in a standardized way. The main purpose of the abstraction of partner-specific interfaces is part of the general interface brokerage idea illustrated below.

Figure 1 – Bosch L.OS interface brokerage model.

In the case of parking management, this means multiple parking service providers can offer their services behind a single pre-defined API interface, and consuming systems have just to integrate once to have access to all providers. This bundling of domain-specific partners is only possible by abstracting the underlying use case, which is representatively described in this post based on the example of parking transactions.

In the first step, we integrated Bosch Secure Truck Parking (BSTP) as a leading truck parking booking platform in Europe into Bosch L.OS. We explored the complexity of the end-to-end service integration via the platform and built a reusable solution for future platform partners (TMS/FMS as well as parking service providers). As a result, we developed a software development kit (SDK) to interact with the Bosch L.OS Parking Management API to consume parking services, and reduce development effort on partner side.

The L.OS Road Services SDK provides TMS/FMS partners with the possibility to integrate parking services within their existing system, avoiding high integration development efforts by using a reusable integration approach. Different TMS/FMS can have different technological needs due to business strategies and legacy systems. Therefore, the solution needs to be reusable throughout different technology stacks.

As a baseline, the SDK covers five defined use cases:

• List bookable parking locations.
• Provide details (rates and amenities) of available parking locations.
• Book a specific parking location.
• Cancel an existing booking.
• Provide a booking overview.

The SDK contains two software libraries and an example application based on the React framework:

• @bosch-los-roadservices/parking-management-api library acts as a middleware that simplifies calls to the L.OS Parking Management API and packages all required (and optional) fields into TypeScript classes.
• @bosch-los-roadservices/parking-management-ui is a frontend library that simplifies the partner integration of the APIs inside their own legacy systems. The library contains a Node.js module and user interface (UI) components, developed using the Stencil.js frontend framework.

Building a Dedicated SDK

Bosch L.OS platform aims to enable as many service providers as possible and allow developers to easily integrate into the ecosystem. To do so, the frontend TypeScript library can generate standards-compliant web components that can work with popular frameworks right out of the box, such as HTML/CSS/JS, React, Angular, Vue, and Ember.

The TMS/FMS domain in Europe is wide and siloed, with hundreds of vendors offering different solutions varying technology stacks. While modern software solutions offer a higher flexibility and modularity easing integrations, legacy applications have been built on a monolithic structure, making the process of developing new application code more complex.

This effort had two goals:

• Develop a solution that facilitates the integration of L.OS Parking Management API into partner legacy applications, reducing time-to-market.
• The solution should be modular to improve development efficiency reducing in-between-releases time windows.

The main challenge in our pilot was to integrate the above-mentioned solution in a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application. WPF is graphical subsystem that renders interfaces in Windows-based applications. The TMS partner was able to integrate the parking feature by leveraging the SDK to export predefined HTML5 components and integrating them in the existing UI design.

Distributing the SDK

As we focus on delivering high-quality software swiftly and securely, we have adopted a robust CI/CD strategy utilizing AWS services to enhance the development and publishing lifecycle. The pipeline is supported by a suite of AWS services, each chosen for its ability to streamline aspects of the software distribution process.

AWS CodeCommit is used for source control management and provides a secure and collaborative environment. AWS CodeBuild compiles and tests code, consistently producing high-quality software packages, and generates the documentation. This documentation is automatically uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and presented using Amazon CloudFront.

Figure 2 – Distribution pipeline.

AWS CodePipeline manages the development workflow and automates the entire release process, from building to testing to deployment, to ensure an effective and streamlined delivery cycle. We store and distribute software artifacts utilizing AWS CodeArtifact.

To provide private and controlled access to the SDK, we developed a solution that integrates Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Cognito, and AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS). The solution provides Bosch L.OS partners with temporary credentials that grant them access to fetch the libraries from AWS CodeArtifact securely.

Partner developers are informed via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) about new releases. They log in into the hosted frontend, get temporary credentials, pull the SDK from the private repository, and update their integration solution with the latest feature set.

Using AWS services like CodePipeline and CodeArtifact speeds up the release cycle of the solution and focuses on bringing more features to the SDK. This solution follows the AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices.

Conclusion

The integration of road services into existing transportation management systems (TMS) and fleet management systems (FMS) can be a small but impactful step to further drive the digital transformation in the logistics and transportation industry. The open and extensible design of this solution allows users to expand the platform with other road services and further platform partners from various domains.

One example for a future use case: Based on transport data from the TMS/FMS, the CO₂ emissions could be automatically calculated to fulfill future European Union transparency compliance. Further, the charging domain for e-trucks in the long-haul market will be another interesting use case. Reservable charging stations and pre-planned capacities with a smart route planning system can support the electrification of the industry.

If you’re a provider of road services or want to test the latest version of the Bosch L.OS Road Service SDK for your TMS/FMS, then explore the growing service portfolio on l-os.com or get in touch with Bosch. The team will provide you with access to the L.OS Developer Portal, where you can find all you need to start building.

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Bosch – AWS Partner Spotlight

Bosch is an AWS Partner and leading global supplier of technology and services that’s pursuing a vision of mobility that is sustainable, safe, and exciting.

Contact Bosch | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace
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Storm Reply – AWS Partner Spotlight

Storm Reply is part of Reply Group, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP with a strong focus on cloud-native development, IoT, big data, and machine learning.

Contact Reply | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace