Provide a One-stop Real-time Arrival Information System for Green Minibus
Following the HKSAR Smart City Blueprint 2.0, the Government laid out 130 innovation and technology initiatives. The Real-time Arrival Information System for Green Minibus (GMB) was one of the initiatives for an Intelligent Transport and Traffic Management System to be implemented by the Transport Department (TD) to help deliver the benefits of the sustainable development of Hong Kong's transport system to the people of Hong Kong.
Overcoming tight scheduling and project complexity
The key challenge of the project was the tight development schedule. The system had to be launched in less than 6 months from the time the contract was awarded. This required a lot of effort in collaborating with different project stakeholders to meet the deadline.
This project involved a wide-range of tasks including: the development and supply of the physical hardware and installing it in minibuses all over Hong Kong; the mobile connectivity for the minibuses to upload the data; the development of an App and platform for arrival-time calculation and data analysis, for the public and all parties concerned, and the arrangements for cloud hosting and managing it.
End-to-end solution with cloud best practices
HKT provided an end-to-end solution which included: developing the App, cloud management services, overall connectivity, and mobile and field services. We deploy a well-architected Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment for the App with a baseline of multi-account architecture. Furthermore, Amazon Kinesis is used to handle real-time data streaming from the GMBs and storing data with a fully managed Amazon RDS, and handling queries on GMB arrival times by AWS Lambda to easily meet dynamic user behaviour.
HKT provide 24/7 monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch on the cloud capacity and utilisation that would offer appropriate remedial action in case of any problems. To enhance performance and privacy, we build a private connection between the AWS and HKT mobile networks with an HKT CloudDirect managed network connectivity service.
Accompany on the cloud journey for continuous optimisation
HKT demonstrated its ability to handle large-scale cloud application integration, from design to deployment, and from building to operation. We successfully managed to deploy the system within the 6-month target.
Leveraging AWS Lambda and infrastructure-as-code, HKT worked with App vendor to improve application performance. We have also been able to reduce cloud spending by 30% with purchasing RI for EC2 and RDS, and reserved node for ElasticCache. HKT is now providing managed services. By delivering logs to S3 and shortening log retention period, we successfully optimized log service spending.
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