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Fleet Dashboard — End to End

Problem: 200 trucks, positions every ten seconds, a dispatcher watching a map. That is 648,000 packets per day. The naive dashboard reverse-geocodes each one.
Nothing expensive touches a GPS packet on arrival.Not geocoding. Not matching. Not routing. Not positioning. The packet is validated and stored. Everything else happens on an event, on view, or overnight.

The architecture

Daily HERE call budget for 200 trucks:
Instrument the ratio of reverse-geocode calls to detected stops. It should be near 1.That single metric tells you more about your bill than any invoice line item.

Prerequisites

  • HERE key with Geocoding & Search, Routing, Traffic, Route Matching, Map Rendering
  • Redis, PostGIS
  • export HERE_API_KEY="..."

Ingest — zero API calls

Reverse geocode — on the event, in a batch

A returned address is a nearest match, not a truth. In rural areas it may be several hundred metres away, on a different property. Store the original coordinate alongside it.Provide heading where telematics supplies it. On a divided highway, a coordinate 15 m from the centreline resolves to either carriageway. Heading disambiguates — free accuracy, fewer “the truck is on the wrong side of the interstate” tickets.

Truck routing — constraints live on the vehicle record

Push the profile to the driver’s device. The most dangerous pattern in mobile fleet software: server-side truck routing with constraints, device-side recalculation without them. The driver deviates, the phone reroutes, and the constraint set never left your backend.

ETA refresh — without re-routing

Routing duration is not the delivery promise. It omits preparation time, service time, and dwell. Model those separately, from your own history. See ETA Calculation.

Traffic overlay — corridor, not bounding box

locationReferencing is mandatory. Omitting it returns E608051.Traffic is a separate meter. An overlay left permanently enabled is a cost decision, not a styling one.

Overnight — trip matching

Reverse geocoding cannot reconstruct a driven route. It returns an address, not a road segment, and it will not survive an IFTA audit.MapVersion is a real response field. A trip matched in March against a March map may match differently in September. Both can be correct. Record which map produced which result.

Common mistakes

Reverse-geocoding on packet ingest. The dominant cost error in fleet software. Looping /revgeocode over detected stops. multi-revgeocode exists. Re-routing on every ping to refresh an ETA. Constraints hardcoded at call sites. They belong on the vehicle record. Constraints on the server, absent on the device. Passing metres where centimetres are expected. A four-centimetre truck routes anywhere, and returns 200. Falling back to car routing when truck routing finds no path. Worse than failing. Using reverse geocoding to determine which road the vehicle drove. Using reverse geocoding for geofence containment. ST_Contains. Polling a city-wide bbox for traffic. Use corridor:. Omitting locationReferencing. Matching packets instead of trips. Not recording MapVersion. Positioning API for outdoor road vehicles. They have GPS. It is free and better.

Scaling

GPS volume is the quiet problem. Anything per-point multiplies by fleet size × ping rate. 200 trucks at 10 s is 648,000/day. At 1,000 trucks on 5 s, it is 6.5 million. Design so that nothing expensive touches a raw ping. Evaluate asset-based pricing. A countable vehicle population with unpredictable call volume is exactly its shape. A dispatcher who reroutes forty times a day is punished by call-volume pricing for diligence. See HERE Pricing Explained.

Vehicle Tracking

The ingest tier, in full.

Fleet Routing

Planning, execution, reconstruction.

ELD Platform

HOS coupling, IFTA, and the audit artifact.

Route Matching

MapVersion, confidence, and warnings.

HERE documentation


Need production HERE API keys or implementation support? Placematic is an official HERE Technologies reseller and implementation partner. We have deployed HERE into production ELD systems. Talk to us.