National Truck Parking Availability Service: Easier Life for German Truckers

Why we like showing this case

We all have witnessed the scene: As evening falls over the autobahn, highway parking lots begin their nightly shapeshift. Long-haul trucks forming a churning puzzle of steel and cargo, every gap being claimed within minutes. Trucks easing onto the shoulder, onto a ramp, onto anywhere at all, becoming a hazard to itself and to everyone still moving. Somewhere behind the wheel of the truck still circling, a driver watches the clock — the law says stop, the road says not here, not yet. If only there was some way of seeing ahead and figuring where parking lots still have space!

This is entirely possible now - the system that enables it has already been built. It turns data that already exists, collected for a different purpose, into a service that benefits an enormous number of people at close to zero marginal data-collection cost. Value-added data reuse at national scale, for public benefit and a more sustainable mobility — that is the kind of work we want to be doing more of.

Task and solution

Truck drivers are legally required to take rest periods, but finding a free spot on one of over 2,000 German highway rest areas is a matter of luck — leading to unsafe improvised parking or wasted search traffic. Separately, trucks running on Germany's national roads continuously send position data from on-board units in trucks, e.g. subject to tolling, so roughly all those that also need to comply with rest periods.

National transport authorities recognized the potential lying in a reuse of truck position data for a truck parking availability service, so that truckers can comfortably plan their route.

Together with our customer, we designed and built an event-driven pipeline that repurposes the existing, pseudonymised position data to compute near-real-time occupancy per rest area, without collecting a single new data point. Vehicle entry and exit events are detected as trucks cross the geofenced boundary of a rest area — modeled and maintained in a dedicated GIS layer — aggregated into an occupancy count per location, refined with an ML model that corrects using a tailor-made statistical model, and published as open data via Germany's national mobility data platform, the Mobilithek. To do so, the standard interfaces (DATEX II, mobilityDCAT-AP) are used, so that any routing app, fleet system, or public authority can use it. We are helping to design, build, and operate the system as a DevOps-driven life-cycle team on a cloud platform. With respect to use of automation, by MLOps we monitor the occupancy models in production. Of course, all actions are compliant with GDPR and Federal Highway Toll Act (BFStrMG).

The MVP went live on schedule within six months and ran operational from day one; today, the resulting occupancy data feeds roughly 50 applications. The service was nominated for a national innovation award in the mobility sector in its first year. What started as a pilot has become a scalable platform that further national mobility data services are now being built on top of — a big step towards a safer, more sustainable mobility.

Boundless possibilities for added-value mobility data services

Data collected for one purpose can unlock enormous value for a completely different one, without collecting anything new at all. If data protection measures are taken responsibly, there are virtually no limits to the reuse of data. Mobility is an area where this opens up a particularly wide range of opportunities to become more efficient and sustainable and to make everyday life easier for many people.
We keep finding this same pattern across our mobility work: wherever large-scale position or sensor data exists, there is a good chance a genuinely useful service is hiding inside it — for private profit, or for public good. To identify such opportunities and to make them reality, it takes the combination of analytical and consulting judgement with expertise processing vast amounts of geodata real-time, cloud-based and on a national scale.

→ Questions or thoughts about mobility data reuse, GNSS-based services, or public-sector data platforms? Dr. Markus Abel is looking forward to your message.