System Architecture at project44

We provide different user interfaces for a variety of needs and user personas. Our Last Mile visibility is used by end consumers to view tracking details and request support from our enterprise shippers and retailers. The Visibility Operations Center provides end to end shipment and order visibility for first mile and middle mile allowing users to track shipments, view the health and planned vs actual items of orders, and break down their network by locations. The Network Management Center allows shippers to configure the carriers that they work with. Yard Management Center allows location managers to schedule the loading docks at their locations. All of these systems are built-upon and manage the core project44 system.

The project44 API enables customers to integrate their systems directly or to use one of our provided adapters for their off-the-shelf Transportation Management System. Integrated systems are able to fetch rate quotes, dispatch shipments, get tracking data, and view scanned documents. It can also push data updates to webhooks on their system in order to provide data in near real time.

The system contains business logic which is unique to sourcing, linking, and processing data for different modes of transportation (parcel, partial trucks, full trucks, rail, ocean, and air). Our ETA data science models account for the nuances of each mode to compute the ETA within that mode and to provide end-to-end ETA for intermodal shipments. The unified tracking system links together data from all modes and normalizes the modal data to a single, intermodal view. The collaborative visibility system allows shippers to share their shipments to the recipients and allows viewing shipment data in different parts of the world.

These systems manage all parts of the life cycle of a shipment before and after it is moving. Users can gather rate quotes from their entire network of carriers, then dispatch a shipment to the carrier and schedule the pickup. It also provides digital documents for scanned bills of lading, delivery receipts, and more.

project44 sources data from tens of thousands of different sources. Some of these sources require us to poll while others can push it to us upon request or push all data. This data is ingested, transformed, and then sent to the core tracking systems for processing using Kafka. It can source data from older, fixed-field-width Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems as well as vehicle position data for aircraft, ships (AIS), rail cars, and trucks. We also have connections to thousands of different carrier APIs to poll and many times more carriers that have integrated to the p44 API to push data into the system for key milestone events.

The ingestion pipeline also enables carriers to control with-whom and where their data is shared using relationships mapped out by the carrier network directory. Carriers can opt to keep their data regionally locked and can manage which shippers they work with to grant access to vehicle data only for the time that the shipper had goods on the vehicle.

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