The Bestmile Fleet Orchestration Platform: What it is (and what it isn’t)

A look at the companies and technologies involved in creating and delivering new mobility services can be confusing. There are hundreds of businesses involved in various aspects of bringing exciting new vehicles and services to market, including Bestmile. Keeping clear of “who does what” is this ecosystem can be challenging. This paper is designed to make it very clear what the Bestmile Fleet Orchestration Platform is and what it isn’t, what it does and doesn’t do.

What Bestmile Is Not

First of all, Bestmile does not provide mobility or transportation services. The platform is software — Software as a Service to be exact — that is cloud-based and can be used to design, deploy, and manage mobility services. Bestmile customers are mobility service providers, including public transport agencies, taxis, ridehailing companies, and automakers entering the mobility services marketplace.

Secondly, the Bestmile Platform is not traditional fleet management software. Traditional fleet management software performs functions like asset management and maintenance, operations management, driver management, and monitoring, and other tasks needed to manage physical fleets.

Thirdly, the Bestmile Platform is not a vehicle. Autonomous vehicles are made by new and traditional auto manufacturers. Some manufacturers are also building their own self driving technology (see below), while others are integrating self-driving technology developed by partners or third parties.

Fourthly, the Bestmile Platform does not drive vehicles and is not self-driving technology — this is the technology that replaces a human driver to accelerate, brake, steer and navigate by processing data from sensors, lidar, and cameras, etc.

Finally, the Bestmile Platform is not a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) mobile application. MaaS applications aggregate the schedules of multiple transit modes and allow travelers to enter pickup and dropoff locations to book a door-to-door journey using the options that best suit their budgets and schedules.

What Bestmile Is

To fully understand what Bestmile does and where it fits in the mobility services ecosystem, let’s review the main components of a modern on-demand mobility service:

The journey starts with a traveler that wants to go from point A to point B using the mode(s) that meet(s) their cost and convenience requirements. The journey might be booked through a service provider’s app or through a MaaS app for a multi-modal trip.

The journey is provided by a mobility service provider such as a bus system, ridehailing service, robotaxi, or other public or private providers.

This is where Bestmile comes in. When a journey is booked, the mobility service provider needs to decide which vehicle to send, when to send it, and what route it should take. To do so, the mobility service provider uses Bestmile’s cloud-based platform. Bestmile’s technology receives the booking, decides which vehicle to send, and assigns missions to vehicles’ self-driving technology or drivers’ mobile apps. The platform takes into account multiple variables. It sends missions that meet the service provider’s passenger convenience and vehicle utilization requirements — minimizing wait times for passengers and deadheading for service providers.

Integrated Ecosystem

The Bestmile Platform integrates with multiple third-party software and data to perform fleet orchestration within a mobility services ecosystem. The Platform can receive bookings from a mobility service provider mobile app or from a MaaS platform. It communicates with vehicle self-driving technology and /or driver mobile apps with bidirectional protocols, sending missions and optimizing dispatching, ride matching, and routing. It also collects and analyzes vehicle performance data including telematics and battery/fuel levels and can perform many of the functions of traditional fleet management products. Finally, the Platform can integrate with data sources such as traffic and weather, and smart city technology to optimize routing.

Control Tower for Vehicles

It can be helpful to think of Bestmile as a kind of air traffic control tower for vehicles. In air travel, vehicles of multiple brands, shapes, and sizes are highly automated but still require air traffic control to guide them safely from gate to gate — on the ground and in the air. Services are both scheduled in the case of commercial airlines, and on-demand in the case of private planes. Service providers submit their bookings, or flights, and their scheduled departure and arrival times, and the air traffic controllers return missions, telling the vehicles/pilots where to go, when they can go, and what route to take.

Bestmile Fleet Orchestration Solution

The Bestmile Platform is part of a complete fleet orchestration solution with all the functions and tools needed to orchestrate fleets of autonomous or human-driven fleets and to deliver predictable mobility services.

Fleet Orchestration Platform

The Bestmile Fleet Orchestration Platform is the dispatching, ride matching and routing engine that optimizes fleet performance with Orchestration, Supervision, Foresight, Planning, and Business Intelligence capabilities.

• Orchestration includes all features needed to optimally dispatch vehicles simultaneously and in real-time. By reacting to incoming bookings and various events, it continuously adapts and reoptimizes vehicle plans, matches the rides to the right vehicles, regulates headways and timetabled trips and communicates the optimized routes and timings to the vehicles via dynamic mission management.
• Supervision provides comprehensive monitoring of the current operational situation, overseeing vehicle and fleet operation in real-time. It gives access to a rich set of dynamic vehicle data, including telemetry, video streams, and dispatch status, as well as weather data and traffic information.
• Foresight functionalities provide advanced predictive features to proactively optimize the operation with respect to future demand. This includes demand forecasting and vehicle prepositioning as well as advanced predictive energy and charging management for electric vehicles.
• The Planning function provides the necessary tools to configure the transportation services as well as the properties of the fleet used to deliver these services. It can be used to define the static elements of the service (service area, lines, and stops) and to specify service quality (timetables or target frequencies), fleet composition, vehicle availability, driver assignments, and shift schedules.
• Business Intelligence provides descriptive analytics and reporting that allow a transportation data analyst to inspect, visualize and extract historical data. The reports cover a large number of key performance indicators (KPIs) related to traveler service levels, vehicle and driver utilization, and fleet efficiency. The business intelligence functionalities facilitate compliance reporting to third-party stakeholders such as public transit agencies.

Applications and Integrations

The Bestmile fleet orchestration solution also includes optional professional and public applications, including a Dashboard for operators, a Safety Driver App for autonomous vehicles level 1–3 attendants, a Driver App for human-driven fleets and a Traveler App to book trips. APIs and a Software Development Kit (SDK) are available to enable providers to build their own traveler mobile apps, either by rebranding Bestmile apps or building entirely custom apps.

Who Uses Bestmile?

The Bestmile Fleet Orchestration Platform is used by mobility service providers that are concerned with optimizing fleet service performance. This is not the same as vehicle performance. Service performance means enabling a fleet to move the maximum number of travelers with the minimum number of vehicles to meet passenger convenience and operator utilization requirements.