Challenge
A manufacturer of innovative mobile LED traffic warning systems for road construction faced a decisive challenge: controlling and monitoring systems distributed across many kilometres was manual and laborious. Every new construction site required individual code adjustments for the system's switching logic — a time-intensive and error-prone process.
The vision was ambitious: a fully connected IoT system enabling planning, configuration, and monitoring of all mobile units through a central web application. The solution had to be not only technically sophisticated but also guarantee highest availability — after all, traffic safety is at stake.
Our Services
We developed a scalable IoT system based on a Spring Boot microservice architecture:
- Event-Driven Architecture: Apache Kafka for inter-service communication
- Real-Time Communication: MQTT for live communication with mobile field units
- Cloud Infrastructure: AWS for high availability and automatic scaling
- Web Application: Drag & drop configuration of warning system switching logic — no code required
- Field Operations: Direct traffic information switching for police and emergency services
Solution
The heart of the system is an event-driven architecture with Apache Kafka for communication between services and MQTT for real-time communication with mobile units in the field. The cloud infrastructure on AWS guarantees high availability and automatic scaling.
The web application enables engineers to graphically plan new construction sites and configure the switching logic of warning systems via drag & drop — without writing a single line of code. For emergency services such as police, there is the ability to directly switch traffic information for long road sections on site.
Result
The impact is enormous: planning and commissioning of new construction sites was reduced from days to hours. The system revolutionised the market for mobile traffic warning systems in Germany and is now used nationwide. A highly available, scalable IoT system that digitises the entire workflow from construction site planning to live control.
