Cycle sharing is expected to reduce traffic congestion and be an environmentally friendly means of transportation. Currently, it is widely recognized as a new mode of transportation that can be easily used for work, sightseeing, and other purposes. DOCOMO BIKE SHARE is the leader in this field, steadily expanding its service area all over Japan by offering ASP systems in addition to its directly operated businesses in Tokyo, Osaka, and Sendai. It has become the largest operation in Japan, with 14,300 bicycles and 1,780 cycle ports in 32 regions across the country. The number of registered members of the directly managed business is approximately 890,000 (as of September 30, 2020), and the number of times the service was used in fiscal 2019 exceeded 12 million, indicating that the service has become rooted in the local community.

"Our service started as a new business development for NTT DOCOMO to solve social problems, and from the beginning we aimed to establish it as a highly public service for citizens," said Mr. Kurokawa. This can only be achieved through a trusted relationship with government, municipalities, and social service providers. Starting with a demonstration project in Yokohama City in April 2011, we have been working with various municipalities," said Kiyotaka Hori, President and Representative Director.
The system of cycle sharing had been built and strengthened within NTT DOCOMO's private cloud, but it was gradually reaching its limits because the business was growing faster than anticipated. Especially since the company's establishment in 2015, the number of usages has doubled every year in the millions, and furthermore, the concentration of traffic in the mornings and evenings has become more pronounced, resulting in a serious increase in the load.

"When I was appointed CEO in 2017, we were already in a difficult situation, and although we thought we had properly expanded our systems with the pride of being a public service, we felt uneasy about the volume of traffic that exceeded that. It was starting to become a concern, not only for drop in the quality of service, but also for the impact on other systems in the same private cloud. Therefore, we decided to fundamentally rethink our system infrastructure based on the need to improve service stability and scalability to handle unexpected increases in demand," said Mr. Hori.

It would be difficult to interrupt the company's service due to the high level of publicity, so it would consider how it could migrate to a new system environment while ensuring continuity by obtaining the necessary advice and assessments.

“First of all, we spent about six months understanding the actual conditions of the old system, which was complicated by repeated expansions, and finding solutions to the problems. Based on the findings, and in preparation for future growth, we decided that a highly scalable public cloud was still preferable. We chose AWS because of its utilization record, versatility, and reliability," said Mr. Hori.

In addition to the infrastructure environment, the system itself was undergoing a major overhaul, so a flexible and adaptable development environment was also a key factor in the company's selection.

"The server sustained a heavy load when the previous application was running, causing delays and other problems not only for users but also for the support team handling the inquiries. So we decided to rebuild it and improve the UI and performance at the same time. AWS provided not only services and systems, but also excellent technical support," recalls Mr. Masamichi Takahashi, former Senior Manager of Mobility Business, Smart Life Promotion Department, NTT DOCOMO, Inc., who was in charge of the development.

The most important factor was the easy accessibility of the connection. In order to contribute to solving social problems in the local community, which is one of the company's business goals, it is essential to collaborate with various companies, including other transportation and payment service providers and Mobility as a Service (MaaS) platforms. In addition, with different issues and players in each region, it was important to have flexible collaboration at a low cost.

"In the Japanese MaaS market, APIs are often different for each platform, and we expected that customization for integration would take time and a lot of work. That's why we adopted Amazon API Gateway, which is widely known among engineers, to reduce the need for specification tuning. It made it easy and fast to connect through AWS Lambda integration. The ease of collaboration is further enhanced when the other party is also in an AWS environment. We also wanted to take advantage of being the de facto standard for this type of cloud computing," said Mr. Takahashi.

Migration to AWS began in November 2018 and was completed in March 2019. In May, the Amazon API Gateway for MaaS integration was implemented, and in August, the database migration to Amazon RDS was completed.

"Because this was not just a migration, but a radical evolutionary overhaul, we were able to focus on development with absolute confidence in AWS, which was the most important achievement," said Mr. Hori.

In parallel with the migration to AWS and the development of the new system, the application and the hardware terminal on the bicycle side are being updated.

"First, we changed the design of the application to reduce the load on the system and polished the UX/UI with a thorough focus on how fast and comfortable riding a bike can be. Functional enhancements have been made, such as displaying bicycle battery status and the number of bicycles available at the port.
In addition, we are currently developing a new terminal on the bicycle side that uses FreeRTOS to connect to the AWS IoT Core on the server side, so that key control from the server side can be achieved by scanning a QR code from the application. Because it was being developed with new communications technology, it was really helpful to be able to start prototyping immediately by utilizing AWS. The new application will be released in June 2020, and the new bicycle terminals will be rolled out by the end of fiscal 2020." said Mr. Hori.

Furthermore, the utilization of collected data through IoT is also planned.
Currently, the company is collecting and accumulating real-time data on bicycle rental and operation status, and by combining it with domestic population distribution statistics and weather data, it has developed a unique shared transportation demand prediction technology through AI analysis used to optimize the allocation of bicycles and collection vehicles.

"Eventually, we would like to link NTT DOCOMO's user data, which has more than 70 million users, to be used for marketing and other business purposes, as well as for administrative measures and university research and surveys. Of course, the use of personal information is subject to permission, and we want to make it valuable to society and individuals," said Mr. Yu Fujii, Manager of Mobility Business, Smart Life Promotion Department, NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

The DOCOMO BIKE SHARE business aims for further growth as it continues to realize its vision by connecting to the MaaS platform and utilizing data collected through IoT.

”We have received offers from many companies to collaborate with us following the migration to AWS and the release of the API. We have already completed the linkage with "NAVITIME" (route search), "d-payment" ( DOCOMO's payment service), "Ringo Pass" (JR East), "EMot" (Odakyu Electric Railway), etc. These cases may not have been possible today if we had not migrated to AWS. Now that we have an environment that allows us to focus on our business with peace of mind, we would like to use our open platform to play a role in urban development and promote initiatives to make DOCOMO BIKE SHARE a part of the city and a favorite among customers,” said Mr. Hori.

Return to the list of customer case studies in Japan »