Green Cab is a full service, shared ride taxi service.  They provide alternative public passenger transportation to all of Madison, Dane County and beyond.  Green Cab always provides coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.  They are the first all hybrid taxi fleet in Wisconsin!

Green Cab has a fleet of brand new Toyota Priuses and one fourteen-passenger van.  Green Cab's goals are to offer their customers the very best benefits for transportation.  This includes being the most affordable, green, clean, efficient, professional and convenient taxi service in Madison.

Why iPads and Drupal?

iPads were chosen as an alternative to an expensive proprietary hardware solution.  Using the iPad greatly lowered the investment cost necessary for the entire fleet of vehicles.

Drupal was chosen to reduce the time frame of development and because it provided much of the functionality out of the box.  There were many modules which, once modified to work together, were able to present taxi location, communicate with the iPad devices, and integrate with the website.

Challenge

Green Cab of Madison wanted to provide a cutting edge solution for their dispatch center.  Additionally, Green Cab wanted to find an integrated ride request solution for the website and create an easy ride delivery and acceptance system for their drivers.

Solution

Promet created an application that uses Drupal as a development framework and integrates with iPads using the services module.  This solution is able to provide a fully functional, cutting edge dispatch application to Green Cab.

The iPad application provides taxi location and direction information back to the dispatch center to assist in ride dispatch.  The drivers use the iPad application to receive rides, calculate fares, communicate back with the dispatch center, check flight arrival information, and route their rides.

Implementation

Utilizing Drupal and the commodity hardware of the iPad, Promet delivered a resusable dispatch application and real time fleet tracking and mapping system.  We were able to save Green Cab thousands of dollars by using the commodity hardware of the iPad and writing custom software with integrates with Drupal.

Promet pushed the envelope of Drupal's capabilities by using it as the framework to develop a highly intensive data processing application used in Green Cab's dispatch center.  This application has the ability to communicate and transfer relevant data to the fleets iPads/drivers as means to issue and monitor dispatch of ride orders.