UK Residents Gain Deeper Insights into Commercial Vehicle Safety After DVSA Migrates Data to AWS Cloud-Native Services with BJSS

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is run by the UK Government. It ensures road safety and vehicle standards across the UK and is responsible for driving tests, vehicle checks, license issuing, and monitoring vehicle recalls. The agency is transforming services through a cloud-first digital strategy. The strategy’s key goals include giving citizens and manufacturers better access to vehicle data to improve customer services and vehicle safety on the UK’s roads.

DVSA launched its digital strategy in 2018. It began digitizing services such as the Ministry of Transport (MOT) test, which every heavy vehicle over 12 months old in the UK has to undergo yearly. As part of the digital push, the agency moved workloads to multiple clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), and rolled out web accounts for customers to download MOT certificates online. In due course, it launched a similar technology upgrade to the Commercial Vehicle Service (CVS) for heavy vehicle testing. DVSA also enhanced user experiences by providing real-time data on vehicle tests for customers.

With CVS data now cloud-based, DVSA saw that modernized cloud-native infrastructures on AWS were increasing agility and enhancing data accessibility. The agency wanted to leverage APIs to make CVS information more readily available. Danny Charles, head of Commercial Vehicle Service (Digital) at the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, explains, “A cloud-native AWS solution will help us extract more value from our data, enhancing its utility for private citizens, business owners, and vehicle developers.”

To deliver a modernized solution, DVSA looked for an AWS partner with specialized knowledge and experience in delivering quality solutions for the public sector. It chose AWS Government Competency Partner BJSS because the company demonstrated its expertise in helping government customers drive innovation and unlock greater value from AWS. Andrew Campbell, UK director of delivery and management at BJSS, says, “By becoming an AWS Government Competency Partner, we validated our technical expertise and proven success, helping us succeed with DVSA and other public sector agencies.”

Using its expertise, BJSS rearchitected DVSA’s AWS environments for microservices, with AWS Lambda delivering serverless computing service and AWS Step Functions orchestrating serverless workflows. AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) moves data from non-AWS-based CVS applications into the infrastructure, and cloud-native AWS Glue extracts, transforms, and loads data from all the migration pipelines for ingestion by Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL databases. To round out the infrastructure, BJSS added Amazon DynamoDB for cloud-native NoSQL database services. Charles explains, “We worked as a single team throughout the project. I felt we had the right meetings at the right times to work through any challenges and stay on schedule. Everyone was focused on delivering our project on time and to budget.”

Using the cloud-native AWS infrastructure, BJSS is helping DVSA deliver greater value through its cloud-first digital approach. Thanks to integrations across CVS applications, staff working at commercial vehicle MOT centers no longer lose time re-keying information into multiple systems. “Our CVS digital strategy is still evolving, but the feedback we’re getting is already really positive,” says Charles. The latest customer satisfaction scores among citizens for the project have recorded 80 percent of external users and 85 percent of internal CVS users being highly satisfied with the advances.

By modernizing its CVS with AWS, DVSA is transforming the value of its commercial vehicle data. Each year, the DVSA processes 1 million commercial vehicle MOT tests. Its vehicle testing management system contains millions of records from these tests over the years. Now, members of the public, commercial vehicle operators, trade associations, and vehicle manufacturers will have flexible access to this data to make better-informed decisions in their work and daily lives.

“Imagine you arrive at an airport, and a coach is waiting to take you to your final destination. Type the vehicle license plate into our MOT history checker to see whether the vehicle has a valid MOT,” says Charles. “Imagine your child is about to go on a school trip. You can check the MOT status of the vehicle and whether it's compliant and legal.”

Commercial vehicle operators will be able to check their Operator Compliance Risk Score, which is based on vehicle data collected by DVSA over a three-year rolling period. The score is based on vehicle test results, encounters, fleet assessments, and prosecution data. “This kind of insight can help operators to manage the maintenance of their commercial vehicle fleets more effectively,” states Charles.

The granularity of the data available through the AWS architecture will help improve the safety of commercial vehicles and the UK’s roads. For example, vehicle manufacturers can access data from tests of heavy vehicles to identify frequently occurring problems with vehicle parts. “The manufacturers could use the information to improve their designs to make their vehicles safer and more sustainable,” Charles says. “With our AWS solution, we’re starting to extract the true worth of our data. There’s still a lot of value there to be mined to benefit road safety.”