Design a delivery system with route visibility
Overview
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, low-latency real-time delivery and route-visualization systems, assessing competencies in distributed systems, event-driven architectures, geospatial data processing, API design, operational monitoring, privacy controls, and failure recovery within the System Design domain.
System Design: Real-Time Delivery Logistics and Route Visualization Platform
Context
Design a platform that allows dispatchers and end customers to view couriers' real-time positions and routes for millions of deliveries per day. The system must ingest GPS data from courier apps, compute and render routes, stream live updates to web/mobile clients, and support historical route queries.
Requirements
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Functional
- Real-time tracking of couriers on a map (sub-second to a few seconds latency).
- Route computation with ETAs; dynamic re-routing with traffic.
- Live and historical route visualization for dispatchers and customers.
- Order lifecycle: create order, assign courier, update status, complete.
- APIs for orders, assignments, location updates, live/historical route queries.
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Non-functional
- Scale to millions of deliveries/day; hundreds of thousands of concurrent couriers.
- Low-latency updates; high availability; multi-AZ deployment.
- Event-driven architecture with durable streams.
- Offline handling for mobile; privacy controls; failure recovery.
- Monitoring, alerting, and capacity estimates (compute, storage, bandwidth).
Deliverables
Detail: service architecture, data model, GPS ingestion pipeline, route computation, map rendering, event streaming, scalability plan, latency vs. consistency trade-offs, offline handling, privacy controls, failure recovery, APIs (orders, assignments, locations, queries), capacity/storage estimates, and monitoring/alerting.
Solution
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