Watchdog

Mileus watchdog search allows the users of a ride hailing (RH) operator to trigger a background search for intermodal journey plans, with the base use case of commuting home from the user's current location.

Intermodal journey combines public transport (PT) with taxi (RH) cars in order to get the best out of both services, resulting in a route that is both comfortable and affordable.

This functionality requires the ride hailing operator to provide APIs for controlling the ride orders flow and also to implement calls to Mileus APIs for order state updates.

The UI from the user's perspective is described in the frontend integration section.

Market validation

Before committing to the full watchdog search functionality implementation, the RH operator can choose to first implement the market validation functionality which aims to collect data on potential user engagement before watchdog is launched.

More information is available in the Market Validation section.

Scheduling

In addition to immediate search described below, the user can also choose to schedule their search beforehand so that Mileus would start looking for matches automatically at a specific time, e.g. 10 minutes after the user's working hours.

More information is available in the Scheduling section.

Search flow

Let's say a user is in their office and is planning to go home soon, but they are flexible in terms of the specific time of departure, so they can either do something for 10 more minutes or they can get on the way immediately. Also, the user would like to use an intermodal journey, if possible.

In this case, the user can open the RH app, select the origin and destination and start the watchdog search. In the background, Mileus starts looking for matches, i.e. intermodal journey plans.

Match

When Mileus matches the user route with a RH car at a suitable location, i.e. detects that there is a possibility for an efficient intermodal journey, the match is presented to the user. It specifies the journey plan, duration, cost, driver rating and other useful details so that the user could decide whether this offer is acceptable for them.

If the match is suitable for the user, they can confirm it, the RH car will be pre-booked automatically for the right time by Mileus and the user can get on the way via public transport.

Journey

After departure, during the PT journey, the user still has the whole journey plan info available in the watchdog search UI.

When the passenger boards the RH car, they can then click through to the native ride screen and track the ride as usually when using the standard RH-only journey.

Once the journey ends, watchdog search is reset and the user can potentially start a new search again.