The GPS dot on your phone is the easy part. The 10-minute parent alert is the hard part.

AIS-140 device integration — what the module reads

AIS-140 is the Indian standard notified by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways in March 2017. It requires all public service vehicles — including school buses — to carry a certified GPS device plus an emergency button. The standard specifies the data fields the device must transmit and the cadence at which it must push them.

The module receives the following data fields from each AIS-140 device:

• Position: Latitude, longitude, GPS accuracy (typical 5-10m on an open road).
• Motion: Current speed, heading direction, distance traveled since last poll.
• State: Ignition on/off, harsh braking events (where the device's accelerometer supports them).
• Cadence: 10-30 second polling interval — every device family slightly different; the module normalises across all of them.
• Emergency button: A press fires a high-priority alert to the transport manager + Principal + designated emergency contact. The bus's current position is included.

SchoolDeck integrates with the major Indian-market AIS-140 device families. If your school already has AIS-140 devices installed (most CBSE schools do, since AIS-140 has been the operating mandate since 2017), they onboard during setup — no hardware replacement, no parallel-system period.

Geofence mechanics — how the 10-minute alert is computed

The 10-minute parent alert is the single feature parents care about most. Schools demo it; parents convert on it. The mechanics matter.

Each stop on each route has a geofence — a circular boundary configured around the GPS coordinate of the stop:

• School-side stop (the school gate): Typical radius 500m. Large enough that GPS jitter near tall buildings doesn't cause premature triggers, small enough to be tight.
• External residential pickup point: Typical radius 1km. Larger because residential GPS accuracy varies more and the parent's walk-to-stop time is part of the 10-minute calculation.
• Highway pickup point (rare): Configurable; typically larger because road network calculation matters more at speed.

Every time the bus pushes a new position, the module recalculates ETA to the next stop using its current speed and the road network distance. When the ETA is exactly 10 minutes (within a 30-second window), the trigger fires. The alert pushes through /features/communication-tool/ over the school's TRAI-DLT-registered WhatsApp Business channel plus a parent app push notification.

If the bus runs late after the first alert — traffic, longer pickup at the previous stop, a driver detour — the module continues to recalculate. When the ETA delta exceeds 5 minutes, a 'delayed' update is dispatched so the parent doesn't wait at the stop on stale information. The discipline is: never let the parent learn about a delay by walking to the stop.

Driver-app fallback — when hardware GPS doesn't exist

Many schools outsource transport to private bus vendors. The vendor's buses may not carry AIS-140 hardware, or may carry incompatible devices that the school cannot map into its dashboard. Forcing the vendor to install new hardware is often a non-starter.

The driver-app fallback handles this. The driver opens the SchoolDeck Driver app on their personal Android phone. They tap "Start Trip" at the depot. The phone's GPS becomes the position source for the duration of the trip. Every parent-alert calculation, every geofence trigger, every route playback works exactly as it would with hardware GPS — the difference is the input device, not the pipeline.

Limitations to be honest about: phone GPS accuracy varies more than dedicated hardware (typically 10-20m vs 5-10m), ignition-state and harsh-braking telemetry are not available, the driver must remember to tap "Start Trip" (a forgotten tap means no tracking until tap, which feeds back into a recurring driver-discipline metric). For schools migrating to AIS-140 hardware over time, the driver-app fallback bridges the gap. Some schools settle permanently on driver-app for outsourced routes and keep hardware AIS-140 only on owned vehicles.

Route assignment → fee billing — the cross-module link

When the transport manager assigns a student to "Route 7 — Stop B," that assignment writes to the student's master record. /features/fees/ reads that field at the next billing cycle and computes the transport fee — either by distance slab (0-5km / 5-10km / 10-15km configured per stop) or by pickup-point-specific pricing the school has set.

This is the structural fix for the under-billing problem most schools experience with disconnected systems:

• A student moves to a different residential area in August. Their bus changes from Route 7 to Route 4 (longer distance, higher slab).
• The transport manager updates the route assignment in this module.
• The student-master record reflects the new route immediately.
• The next fee invoice (September) reads the new route, applies the new slab.
• The fees clerk did nothing. The audit didn't catch under-billing three terms later because there was no under-billing.

The boundary is clean: this module owns the route assignment field; the fees module owns the billing computation. Each writes to its own surface; both read from the canonical student record at /features/students/.

Vehicles in the Fixed Asset Register — Schedule II Section A

Every school bus is a Trust asset. It depreciates. It carries an insurance policy with renewal cycles. It needs an annual RTO Fitness Certificate. It needs a quarterly PUC certificate. It accumulates AMC contracts and major service events. The Trust's auditor needs to see all of this in one place — the Fixed Asset Register (FAR).

When a vehicle is registered in this transport module, it is auto-listed in the FAR at /features/inventory-management/ under:

• Companies Act 2013 Schedule II Section A — Motor Vehicles. Useful life of 8 years for school operation context (commercial-use category). Straight-line depreciation methodology by default; written-down-value option available where the Trust's accounting policy mandates it.
• Income Tax Rule 5 parallel block — 30% block for buses. Two depreciation schedules maintained in parallel for the same asset, both reconcilable to the same purchase ledger entry.
• Insurance + PUC + RTO FC documents — attached to the same vehicle record. 30-day-advance renewal alerts. No vehicle accidentally operates uninsured or with expired FC.
• AMC contracts + major service events — life-of-vehicle log. Useful when a vehicle reaches its 8-year statutory life and the Trust evaluates replacement vs continued operation.

The Trust's auditor sees one consistent vehicle entry across the operational transport view (where it is) and the FAR audit view (what it is worth). The school's CA does not have to reconcile two registers.

Drivers as staff — attendance, POCSO clearance, behaviour scorecard

Bus drivers and conductors are not a separate workforce category in SchoolDeck. They are staff. They appear in /features/staff-attendance/ with the same record structure as teachers and non-teaching staff, with these specific accommodations:

• Split shift pattern: Morning route (typical 5:30-9:00 AM) + afternoon return route (typical 2:30-5:00 PM) with paid mid-day rest. The shift management module knows this is one staff member's working day, not two.
• Daily duty trips logged from GPS: Actual driving hours, route covered, idling time. Feeds the payable-day output to /solutions/staff-payroll-hr/ with overtime computation per Motor Vehicles Act 1988 working-hour limits.
• POCSO clearance flag: Driver and conductor profiles must carry a POCSO Act 2012 background-check clearance. /features/role-based-access/ blocks unclearedstaff from being assigned to any student-carrying route.
• Behaviour scorecard: Speed-threshold-breach count, idling-time-exceeded count, harsh-braking events — feeds the appraisal review. Drivers see their own scorecard in the staff app; the transport manager sees the fleet-wide ranking.

Pipeline ≠ Solution ≠ FAR ≠ Fee Billing ≠ Communication Channel

The SchoolDeck transport cluster spans five distinct ownership layers. Knowing the boundaries helps schools evaluate them correctly.

• This page · /features/transport/ — Owns the GPS-to-parent-app pipeline. AIS-140 device integration, geofence radius mechanics, 10-minute parent alert trigger, route playback, driver behaviour at the data layer. The technical mechanism page.
• /solutions/transport-bus-management/ — Owns the end-to-end fleet compliance buyer story. Running a school bus fleet to AIS-153 standards covering vehicle physical safety, RTO Fitness Certificate cycle, CBSE bus rules, Supreme Court Mishra Committee directives, RTO audit prep. The Principal-facing solutions page.
• /features/inventory-management/ — Owns the Fixed Asset Register. Buses depreciate under Companies Act Schedule II + IT Rule 5 parallel blocks. AMC + insurance + RTO documents attach here.
• /features/fees/ — Owns transport fee billing computation. Reads route assignment from this module; applies distance-slab or pickup-point pricing.
• /features/communication-tool/ — Owns parent message delivery. The 10-minute alert is computed here; the message is dispatched there over the TRAI-DLT-registered WhatsApp Business channel.

Five pages, five owned layers. Each targets a distinct query intent — this page is for the IT or transport-tech evaluator asking "how does the GPS pipeline actually work?"

Basic GPS tracker vs SchoolDeck bus tracking module

Practical differences for a Transport Operations Head running a 40-bus fleet across day-school routes.