Meridian

Live fleet map

A live map of 140 vans for a dispatch room that used to call drivers to ask where they were.

Client: A regional delivery company (fictional)
Year: 2025
Role: Architecture, Back end, Map interface
Stack: Node, WebSockets, MapLibre, TimescaleDB

Placeholder case study: a fictional brief that shows the layout until real work replaces it.

Context

Dispatchers tracked vans through phone calls and a shared document. Late deliveries were discovered by the customer, and nobody could say afterwards where a van had been at 14:10.

Idea

One WebSocket stream per dispatcher, positions downsampled by zoom level so the map never draws more than it can show, and a time slider over the last 48 hours stored in a time-series table.

Craft

Positions are clustered on the server by the viewport, so 140 vans cost the same as 14.

The time slider replays a day; the route is drawn as it was driven, with stops as pauses.

Alerts are rules on the stream: a van stopped for 20 minutes outside a depot gets a flag.

Outcome

Shipped as a Node service on TimescaleDB with a MapLibre front end.