How to Track Live Vehicles in Mapify

Discover how to track live vehicles using real-time data in Mapify. Imagine watching buses move across the city on your screen, their speed, heading, and even door status updating every second. That’s exactly what we’ve built in this example, powered by real-time data from Helsinki’s public transport system.

Let’s walk through how we did it. We begin with Data Feeds, the bridge that brings real-time data into Mapify. You can connect through HTTP or MQTT, depending on how the data is served. For this tutorial, we’re using DigiTransit’s open MQTT broker, which streams vehicle data across Finland.

To access this stream, all you need is the broker’s address and the correct topic subscription. Here, we’re focusing on “VP” messages, short for Vehicle Position, which include GPS coordinates, speed, and heading. If a vehicle goes underground or drops connection, some fields might be blank, appearing as "null".

Head over to the Mapify console. Start by creating a Dataset. This is where all the incoming data will be stored. Ours includes fields for latitude, longitude, speed, direction, timestamp, and a custom vehicle ID to uniquely identify each one.

Next, we create a real-time Layer linked to this Dataset. This is what will render the vehicle icons on your map and refresh them as new data flows in. With the Layer in place, we configure a Data Feed to connect to DigiTransit. We plug in the broker address, subscribe to the VP messages, and set up a schema so Mapify knows how to read the incoming data.

Then we build a Workflow. This is the logic that processes the data and feeds it into the Dataset. We add steps to clean the data, for example, filtering out entries with missing GPS, and generate a unique ID for each vehicle by combining the operator and vehicle codes. We also configure the Workflow to update the coordinates and sensor fields in the Dataset. The Key field ensures each update modifies the correct entry on the map.

Once the Workflow is active, your map comes to life. You’ll be able to see vehicles updating in real time, each styled with a custom icon. The updates happen continuously, no refresh needed, and Mapify handles millions of messages per hour effortlessly.