We run just over a hundred electric vans in a fleet of about nine hundred, and the plan the board approved this year makes most of the fleet electric within eight years. I was not in the room for most of that decision, and I understand why. A van is a vehicle and vehicles belong to fleet. But the more of them we run, the more I expect the electric fleet to become one of the most important systems I am responsible for.
A diesel van is ready in the morning because somebody filled it the afternoon before. An electric van is ready because software decided overnight how to share a limited grid connection between eighty chargers. The charge management platform at our largest yard knows each van's battery level, tomorrow's route from the transport planning system, and the electricity price by the half hour, and it schedules every charger accordingly. If it loses the route plan, it charges every van equally. If it loses contact with the chargers, they fall back to a slow default rate.
In March a change to the planning system's interface broke that link just after midnight, and nobody noticed until six. The vans facing the longest routes had charged exactly as much as the ones doing short town runs, and twelve of them could not have completed their day. Nothing had gone wrong while anyone was working. The damage from a fault at night had simply waited for the morning shift to find it.
That changes how I think about recovery. For most of our systems a few hours of downtime overnight barely registers. For the charging platform the night is the only time that matters, and an outage at one in the morning costs far more than the same outage at noon. The integration now has the same monitoring and on call cover as the warehouse system. The platform has a documented fallback that charges against yesterday's routes instead of none. And its recovery objective is written in kilometres of range lost by six o'clock, not in hours of downtime.
Over the next decade I expect more of our operation to depend on software that works while nobody is watching and reveals its failures the following day. Our tiers of criticality were drawn around systems people use while they work. They will have to be redrawn around the systems that prepare the work.
– Serguey Shinder
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