Challenges
Nowadays, the parking industry needs to offer car drivers alternative ways to pay for their parking as this need is dictated by the marketplace and by the physical and infrastructure requirements within various car parks. Following that paradigm, our customer has produced a new type of parking payment kiosk. The project represents a tool based on the embedded Android operating system with a 10" touchscreen. To make it fully functional, the client needed to create all internal applications helping to interact with payment services and various hardware devices like credit card terminals, printers, etc.
It’s also worth noting that the client provides the opportunity for 3rd party service providers to design and embed their UI applications (e.g taxi booking, traffic tickets payment, etc.) to the kiosk.
Solution
Our solution works as a layer providing secure work conditions between all external applications and the payment hardware. Due to the nature of the business, the customer put an emphasis on the quality of the source code, reliability and 24/7 trouble-free operation features of our applications.
The Payment HUB:
- a layer that interacts with devices like credit card terminal, coin selector, printer;
- a layer interacting with web services (payments, tickets, etc.);
Parking Services:
- a layer to calculate the variety of parking tariffs;
Specific features
Each parking kiosk has a 3G connection to the Internet. This way, applications work fine in poor Internet conditions, and even sometimes in offline mode without any network. As for the project itself, it represents an international collaboration between development offices from several countries across Europe.
Results
The outcome of the project is a robust solution with an entirely new architecture made from scratch. IT engineers at Elinext regularly update the software and add new functionalities to support emerging features.
