Aivolution was incorporated in 2003 to solve complex and large scale information technology problems time and cost effectively, by leveraging commodity open source technologies to the fullest wherever the benefits can be demonstrated in terms of maintainability, scalability and total cost of ownership. Aivolution has repeatedly demonstrated this capability.
Aivolution's founder, Hans Van Wesenbeeck, has had a passion for computers for over three decades. He pursued studies in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to match his expectations for the kind of services machines should be able to perform for humans. At a time when the Internet had barely come into existence, and when computer's Random Access Memory was expressed in Kilobytes, the field of AI was a little ahead of what was technically possible. A lot of work was still needed to be done on the foundational levels of software development.
The company started off with a 7 year contract for the development and maintenance of a state-of-the-art, centrally managed point-of-sale and inventory control system for the motion picture exhibition industry. The most complex ingredient of the system Aivolution developed was the distributed, message queue based inventory control system with advanced cost-of-goods-sold calculations. We developed this system while the inventory control systems of major retailers still relied on fax machines and Redwood trees.
In 2005, Aivolution re-applied, refined and *spatially enabled* the messaging-centric distributed platform developed for the transaction intensive retail industry, to process traffic-light controller and radar-measured arterial traffic information for the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency in the context of its Smartcorridors ITS program. The system we developed replaced an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) developed by Bentley Systems which was fraught with costly maintenance issues. This project brought Aivolution a step closer to it's mission to develop systems that could be termed 'intelligent'.
In 2006, the Transportation System Information division of Caltrans provided us with an opportunity to further refine this enterprise architecture to develop a traveler information message processing system, showcasing a wealth of real-time congestion and traffic related information on an interactive web-based map destined to the public. The Java JMS / XML based messaging infrastructure we introduced was one of the first of its kind at Caltrans and we would like to believe that it influenced the adoption of ESB technology now adopted by the Enterprise Architecture group.
