Billing and Invoicing

One of the critical pieces of data that MOOVE captures in real time is the complete lifecycle of a single trip, from the moment a driver accepts a trip to when they drop-off a rider(s) at their final destination. A typical trip lifecycle spans across six distinct event streams, with events generated by the rider app, driver app, and MOOVE’s back-end platform (in this case the dispatch capability). These events thread into a single trip, and the associated date must be recorded for purposes including Billing.

These event streams are logically grouped together by a time-bounded state machine that models the flow of different user and system (server-generated) events towards completion of a single trip, referred to as a session.

In the context of a MOOVE trip, a session thus consists of a series of events starting with a Driver accepting an assigned Trip and ending at the successful completion of their trip. MOOVE considers that not all sessions go through a complete series of events, as a rider might cancel a trip or a car might break down. The state machine makes the trips stateful and records all events from the start to the end of a Trip.

Given that mobile and GPS signals are non-uniform across the physical journey of a Trip, the Events posted by the mobile clients vary in fidelity. In low bandwidth or weak signal areas, messages are often lost and sent multiple times. Further, GPS Signals are lossy and mobile clients often go offline due to low power mid-session, making it difficult to map GPS signals to physical road segments. The accurate map matching of GPS signals to the roads traversed is critical to accurate calculation of distance traveled and billing. This is covered in another post on MOOVE’s Map Matching Service. Further, the bill must be computed based on the actual path chosen by the driver and not was provided by the guidance system. This is done offline by providing the raw GPS signals, as described in the post on computing actual distances.

The Billing models used in MOOVE fundamentally come down to computing distance and time travelled regardless of the business model in use with a given Enterprise customer. They are described in more detail in the Post related to the Analytics Service which looks at a Bill as a special purpose or custom report.

The various Billing Models considered by MOOVE are described in the attached document.

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