What is the demand on specific routes? What are the freight rates in Europe? How did the pandemic affect the number of freights in individual countries and regions? Have any new logistics opportunities emerged? The largest Polish portal dedicated to the logistics industry created a tool that can provide anyone with the data necessary to answer these and other questions.
The Story Behind the Tool
Metrix is a tool for analyzing data based on demand, supply, and freight rates on the European market. This project was created by the Trans.INFO portal in collaboration with the Trans.eu platform. Part of the IT work was done by the fireup.pro team. Metrix presents graphs for freight rates, supply, and demand for transportation. Anonymous data comes from SPOT offers from the Trans.eu platform and covers the time from the beginning of 2020. Their monthly number exceeds 400,000.
The idea of an aggregation tool and presenting large amounts of data contained in logistics has been on our mind for some time. We had collaborated with fireup.pro on several projects before, so we have swiftly jumped from the idea phase to implementation says Szymon Knychalski, CEO & Editor-in-Chief at Trans.INFO.
What Solutions Does Metrix Use?
The project spans across two applications: one for frontend and one for backend. Both communicate through a mutual GraphQL interface. On the backend side, things are run via Node.js, which queries the MySQL database using a TypeORM library. The frontend, in turn, queries the backend using GraphQL’s „query language,” and displays data in the form of graphs, statistics and maps. The data are visualized through React and support libraries like Recharts, D3, Leaflet, and OpenStreetMap. To establish a communication process with the GraphQL server, we used Relay, a GraphQL client created by the programmers of Facebook.
Application testing is done using Jest and Enzyme, and the dashboard is additionally tested with Cypress’ ‘End to End’ framework. The entire project runs on Amazon AWS, which makes it ready for resource auto-scaling, while CI/CD ensures automatic deployment to production, including integrated tests.
To discover Metrix yourself, register an account on http://metrix.trans.info. A free trial will remain available until June 30.
Check out our other projects for Logistics Development at https://fireup.pro/industries/logistics-services
