Car-sharing application with adaptive rent rate depending on client’s driving manner

Searching for the way to motivate careful driving and extend rental cars lifetime for car-sharing business. 

A company has a car-sharing business and would like to extend the lifetime of their cars. To solve this problem the company plans to motivate customers to drive more carefully. They want to know what happens to the car during the rental period in order to reward responsible drivers and probably apply penalties to negligent customers. 

Providing adaptive rental rate by tracking and analyzing drivers` behavior.

According to worldwide statistics, speeding is the main reason for car damage and accidents. We offered to the customer the implementation of a business model based on driving style control. 

In order to estimate driving behavior, we have to record all cases when: 

• driver exceeds maximum legal speed;
• driver exceeds acceleration considered to be safe for a particular car model both for speeding-up and for braking;
• driver exceeds the turning speed defined by the customer as safe for a particular car model. 

All these restrictions the customer can set up and change individually. 

Depending on how often situations that were mentioned occur, safe or dangerous driving manner is determined. From this perspective, the customer can provide an adaptive rental rate to the client. According to that model, the client who drives safely will receive a partial refund on car return.

Installation of Raspberry Pi board to the car, capturing driving events, and transferring data to the cloud.

We offered to develop a device that will be installed in the car. This device will record all movement characteristics such as acceleration and speed for all three axes transmitting information to the cloud. We created such a device based on Raspberry Pi. We added to the standard configuration GSM module for connection with cloud, GPS module for car speed detection and accelerometer.

We store all gathered data in the cloud. To minimize traffic, we transfer only safety driving violations information.

We choose Amazon as a cloud provider as it has a set of services that solve some of the typical IoT development tasks without a lot of coding. For instance, such as upgrading firmware. 

Our solution consists of several components:

1. Mobile application for IOS and Android, that captures and displays events related to driving manner.
2. We use administrative web-console for operational activities, for instance, car rental registration, and setting up the bounds for speed and acceleration. 
3. IoT application that is located on Raspberry Pi board. Before car rent, we load predefined parameters such as acceleration and speed limits to device. Simple logic is implemented to the device to check speed and acceleration values. In case of exceeding determined characteristics, we create a data package for transferring to the cloud. If the connection is broken, we accumulate packages and send them all when the connection is restored. We use REST API over HTTPS because the car is in motion and we can’t rely on connection with the backend constantly.
4. The biggest and the most complex part of the solution is the backend. It contains several parts. 
   4.1. IoT Device Gateway that contains Rules Engine. Customers use the Admin Panel to set up rules. Storage of packages in DynamoDb is the rule applied to all events. We gather all information about each client before the end of the rental period. Then we move this information to the cheaper storage such as S3. We don’t delete this data in order to use it for returning clients. In this case, our customer can offer them some individual rate based on the stored information. Some events can force the application to use AWS SNS (Amazon Simple Notification Service) and send push notifications to the client`s phone.
   4.2. Mobile Gateway implements REST API for mobile application. This API allows clients to get all information about the violations.
   4.3. Admin Gateway implements REST API for operational activities and device settings. It also enables to see archive data.