Real-time public systems

GIS and Transportation

Transportation platforms combine live position, route computation, maps, and public APIs. Demand peaks are synchronized by the clock, so average load says little about the architecture required.

The constraints that shape systems here

• Real-time vehicle positions arrive continuously and out of order
• Route computation and map tile serving have different cache profiles
• Open data APIs have third-party consumers outside operational control
• Concurrency rises sharply at commute peaks and during disruption
• Passenger information has a short useful lifetime

Where Blobb has worked in this sector

In a prior role, a Blobb founder architected and launched the Tisséo mobile app ↗ and architected and operated its wider public transport digital platform. The app has been downloaded more than 5 million times; the platform served 500,000 daily active users and 100 million requests per month.

Common findings

• Cache policy does not match data freshness
• Peak traffic is hidden by daily averages
• Public API consumers share failure paths with passenger applications
• Route computation cost is not attributed to request type

An independent assessment is often a useful first step; it can be a full architecture audit or a focused review. Related work includes performance optimization, architecture, and the mobile platform audit.