Project goals

AXA Asistance Serwis Sp. z o.o. specializes in road assistance services. The company operates between car  insurance companies and towing companies.  Due to a planned expansion of its operations, the  company needed a new and more effective way of communication with its towing units, which both register and report car accidents and tow away broken vehicles.

The major goal of the project was to build a pilot system that would be responsible for:

• locating towing units positioned closest to a crash site;
• dispatching a towing unit to a crash site;
• producing an accident report on  the crash site by a towing unit driver and transmitting it in an e-form to company HQ.

Project description

A basic tool for a towing driver is a Palmtop equipped with digital camera and GPS module. Palmtop communicates with mobile phone in an infrared mode.

After reaching a crash site, the driver, using its digital camera built in Palmtop, takes a photograph of a damaged vehicle and fills in an electronic report on Palmtop’s screen. After compressing the photos, the report is sent to HQ.

The mobile part of the system has been developed in Java 2ME technology and installed on PALM OS operating system.

The server part of the system is based on an application server and has been developed in J2EE with use of EJB components.

A vital part of the system is the e-point SA communication protocol implemented between mobile devices and the central part of the system. To accomplish this, GPRS protocol provided by ERA GSM mobile operator has been used for the first time.

The central part of the system, available to dispatch center employees is responsible for:

• locating reported crash sites and towing units with the help of digital maps, showing the present location of towing unit thanks to GPS module installed in the driver’s Palmtop; 
• managing of accident reports and filing them to appropriate insurance companies.