Blacklane is a global premium chauffeur service platform that provides airport transfers and chauffeured car services to corporate and individual clients.
We delivered a dispatching system, that includes shift management, an optimizing scheduler, and a revamped marketplace service using an auction mechanism. As part of our work we consolidated existing systems and introduced technical improvements to the main (legacy) fulfillment system. We made a UI for operations staff to better understand the dispatching process and market situation, and take remediating action where needed. We were also responsible for planning, coordinating, and cooperating with stakeholders and adjacent development teams.
With the new shift management tool, the operations control team is able to organize and schedule the shifts of the available chauffeurs. The highly performant scheduling algorithm can then plan the shifts and assign rides to them and continuously revise to incorporate new information about delays, cancellations and new bookings. The improved tooling enabled the scaling of the fleet to more than a hundred shifts per day.
The revamped marketplace led to a dramatic reduction in resource consumption and outages caused by the previous system. Establishing practices like endpoint based tracing and having audit tables for status updates greatly improved monitoring and troubleshooting.
Supported by the UI, the operations team is able to solve issues without dev support using the provided troubleshooting tools; this was evident during the launch of on-demand service in New York. The tools also allow previewing manual changes, which gives confidence to the team working with it that their changes will have the desired effect.
From a technical perspective, we: