Platform Science

Problem

Navigating a semi-truck is not navigating a car with a bigger engine. The legal route depends on the vehicle: bridge heights, weight limits, hazardous-material restrictions and turn radii all rule out roads a consumer app would route you down without comment. Getting it wrong is not a wrong turn — it is a truck that physically cannot proceed, on a road it cannot reverse out of.

The in-dash context is its own constraint. The unit is fixed in the cab, read by a driver who is moving, and used across a fleet rather than by one owner who can be trained on it. Whatever the interface asks of a driver, it asks while they are driving.

Approach

Realm 8 led the navigation research for the fleet platform and built a working mobile prototype of the in-dash navigation experience.

The research came first deliberately. On a problem like this the routing engine, the map data licence and the hardware target constrain one another, and picking any one of them before understanding the others is how a platform inherits a decision it cannot later undo.

That research selected HERE Maps — the former NAVTEQ — and the reason is the part worth understanding. Commercial routing is not a feature bolted onto a consumer map. The vehicle profile has to reach the routing engine itself, so that height, weight and hazmat attributes are applied when the route is computed rather than checked afterwards. Very few providers carry that data at national scale with a licence that permits it, which narrows the field long before anyone writes code. HERE did.

The prototype then existed to make the findings concrete: something running in a cab rather than a document arguing about what should.

Outcome

Still being written.