Tracking across carriers: one screen, six APIs, no spreadsheets

Introduction

Six carriers publish six different vocabularies for the same event. One calls it discharged, another calls it gate-out full, a third sends nothing at all until the box moves inland. Until those feeds agree, a tracking page is just a place where spreadsheets go to be re-typed.

Normalising The Events

We map every carrier status onto a single set of nine milestones and keep the raw event underneath it. The client sees one language; when something looks wrong, the desk can still read the original message from the carrier rather than a lossy summary.

The Gaps Nobody Advertises

Two of the six feeds go quiet between departure and arrival. We fill those windows with terminal and agent data instead of leaving a blank, and we label the source so nobody mistakes an inference for a scan.

Looking Ahead

Next is predicted ETA against actual berth performance rather than published schedule, so the number on the screen is the one worth planning against.