The Wait Advisor

In the lead up to the Technology and Maintenance Conference in Melbourne, News Corporation Australia's Big Rigs published an article about the Wait Advisor. Our thanks to Bob Riley for writing this up.

So, it is official. The Wait Advisor Team is coming to Melbourne for the Technology and Maintenance Conference on 15 October 2018. It will be an opportunity to validate the project with stakeholders, as it will also be an opportunity to spread the word about this project. In preparation for the conference, we have prepared a couple of images which can be used by any interested party for publication. The first one is an image of a model holding a smartphone showing how it will look like when the Wait Advisor is activated. A woman holding a smartphone, photo courtesy of pexels.com. The second image shows a hand holding a Google Pixel phone, which has the Wait Advisor featured in the screen. Comments are welcome, please send us feedback at www.in2teq.com. The Wait Advisor app shown on a Google Pixel phone. For the sake of demonstration, we have also used mock-up location data centred on the conference venue at the Automotive Centre of Excellence in the Dockl

The UI design for the app has to be kept simple, straight-forward, intuitive and easy to use. This is in consideration of the fact that the end-user, the truck driver, should not be bothered too much. In addition, the demographics of Australian truck drivers show the majority to be 40's and above. Being true to this, the following are the suggested screens: This is the screen when the app is started. It is quite simple to use: there is only a toggle switch to turn wait recording on or off. Once the wait recording is turn on, the screen is updated to reflect the current state of the app. It will just remain as simple as this one until the app is closed. This screen is a notification screen, as when the user is being prompted to confirm whether the location change noted means that the wait has been terminated and the truck is ready to hit the road OR that the wait continues, the noted location change is just due to a huge enough area that speeding up to driving sp

General Requirement The general requirement is to develop an app which records the amount of time a user spends within the vicinity of a location. Data on the wait time and the location where the wait was made should be transmitted to a server. Starting and ending recording is user-initiated. Thus the app should enable the user to toggle between start recording and end recording. The app should be able to recover in case the user forgot to initiate end of recording. Thus the app should check for location change at fixed intervals and therefrom determine if circumstances suggest that the user has forgotten to initiate end of recording. The app should send data to the server, but in case there is no data connection, it should be able to queue the data for transmission and send it out once a data connection is established next time the app is activated. Assumptions The following assumptions are made and included as business rule: First, polling of location data is at

The Wait Advisor is an app which truck drivers can use to record wait times. A typical user story will be like this: Use of the app is as simple and straightforward as possible. When a truck is stuck in a queue, the truck driver can quickly activate the app and when the wait is over, the truck driver simply deactivates the app to signal that the truck is ready to move to its next destination. What happens in the background is that when the truck driver activates the app, it records the current time and location. When the app is deactivated, it records the time and location at the time of deactivation. The wait time is then calculated as the time that has elapsed between the time when recording was started to the time when it was stopped. The app then transmits this data to the server in the cloud. Data is gathered in this way. The more truck drivers use the app, the more data the server will receive. When there is sufficient number of users, data can then be aggregated to make

The Wait Advisor was conceived during the #FatigueHACK, a hackathon organised by the Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) for the Australian Trucking Association (ATA) held in parallel with Trucking Australia 2018 at the National Convention Centre Canberra on the 18th to the 20th of April 2018. The hackathon challenge was simple: current fatigue management systems do not seem to work, the participants were asked to propose solutions that might. There were at least 8 teams in the hackathon, and we were Team 5 (known as Team Comags). Click here for the hackathon website at CBRIN and to check out the other participants . During the hackathon, we had access to mentors and resource persons such as truck drivers, operators and owner-drivers. What came out as a common theme in the conversations we had was that the delays at the point of loading and unloading whatever cargo the trucks are carrying were a pain to everyone. It has been happening but nothing has been done about it. Hauling