Digital products to facilitate market expansion of a leading provider of EV charging stations

Our customer decided to expand their business and enter the EU market. However, the company’s expansion was slowed down by their legacy systems, which became inefficient and difficult to support. To remain competitive in the market, the customer needed to modernize the existing products and develop new solutions.

Together with our partner, we launched several projects with diverse tech stacks to support their goals of expanding to new markets. They included:

• Migrating the product’s UI from PHP and Angular to React, and working on creating an accessible solution for people with disabilities;
• Integrating different parts of the system written in Java, PHP, and Golang;
• Working on the solutions that handle the communication and management of all charging stations connected to the customer’s cloud platform;
• Developing the back-end of the new type of the charging station that was launched by the client;
• Migrating the system to the cloud, as well as monitoring and improving its reliability.

The N-iX team has enhanced the existing SaaS driver portal. The portal provides drivers with all possible information needed, such as a charging map, various how-to guides, the ability to schedule charging depending on the price of energy, etc. We have created new React components, built new components in the general library, and provided quality assurance. Also, we have contributed to the development of a brand-new responsive driver portal.

Additionally, we have created a fleet management system from scratch using React. The new system allows fleet managers to monitor the charge levels of their fleet and choose their charging locations. The solution works for heavy-duty bus and truck fleets as well as fleets of passenger EVs.

This is the first fully integrated global fleet management solution specifically designed for the unique needs of an electric fleet, delivering:

• A critical piece of the fleet ecosystem that brings together data from multiple systems to provide deep insight and control;
• Access to complete and comprehensive fleet data that simplifies predicting activities and provides the framework for predictive capabilities;
• A global solution to help fleets increase the level of control over the energy they consume and make smarter use of the power they manage.

Our specialists have provided support and feature enhancement of the large internal system using Java, PHP, and Golang. The system consisted of several monolith solutions and several services, which we moved to microservices.

Our client required many integrations as their business expanded to the European market. Therefore, our team has also developed multiple solutions for EU drivers:

• Integration with EU fuel card providers (like MTC) which customers can use for business trips;
• Making adjustments to the product for leasing companies;
• Support of different payment gateways like TransferWise which are used for business trips.

As the old system needed modernization, our client decided to migrate to Go, considering the convenience of working with the cloud. The N-iX team has been responsible for the communication and management of all charging stations connected to the cloud. The client’s solution is regionally distributed (USA, Canada, Australia, EU), allowing any station owner to monitor and manage their station state, configure it, collect statistics, set payment rules, and more.

N-iX has managed the following systems:

• PHP (backend) station communication gateway (PHP, RabbitMQ, MySQL), which is set at the front on direct station communication (sockets) and via OCPP server (translator for an industry-standard protocol).
• Message processor (Golang, REST (gin-gonic), RabbitMQ, MySQL, Prometheus, Docker, Jenkins), which handles the processing of translated station messages.
• Station-API (Golang, REST (gin-gonic), RabbitMQ, MySQL, Prometheus, Docker, Jenkins, AWS S3), which is a single RESTful interface that handles all work with business-layer device objects using an HTTP interface without direct connection to a DB. Services directly access the databases, which can be critical. We have added the firmware update feature to this service first, as it was required for expanding the business to the EU.
• Faults-service, which is aimed to be a single point of responsibility for early detection of any issues based on their telemetry or message flow characteristics. For instance, when the station temperature rises, technical support will arrive and fix it before it becomes inoperable.

N-iX has worked on the back-end for the new type of charging stations using PHP. It was designed to meet the global requirements for DC fast charging. It is a modular system that consists of one or several separate power blocks and the charging station itself. The modular architecture of the platform ensures that installation can scale as demand for power and ports increases.

All client stations work by OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol). Such integrations allow gathering information about stations, predicting their status, and providing required information for drivers, administrators, and owners.

The N-iX team has created a brand-new portal using React and enhanced the existing SaaS driver portal. We have also developed and released the fleet management system to production.

Additionally, we have developed solutions for EU drivers, such as integration with the EU fuel card providers, adjustment of the product for leasing companies, and payment implementation for business-related trips.

Finally, N-iX has contributed to the development and enhancement of several solutions, including station communication gateway, message processor, station-API, and faults-service. Our team has worked on the backend development for the new type of charging station and implemented features for station management and monitoring using industry-standard protocols.

N-iX has helped the client achieve their main goals:

• Expand their business and enter the EU market by obtaining new solutions;
• Provide a convenient user experience for drivers, administrators, and station owners by modernizing the older systems and creating new ones.