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Out of hours trip

Know when an asset travels outside working hours. You describe when travel is expected (the working days and the working hours), and the rule reports the trips that fall outside it.

Use it to catch unauthorised vehicle use at night or at weekends, to check that a night shift is running when it should, or to hold a duty-of-care record for out-of-hours driving.

Stating the normal week

Stating when travel is normal is shorter than stating every exception to it, and it is the shape most operators already have written down. So the rule takes working days and working hours, and everything outside them is the alert.

Local time, at each end

The rule reads the clock where the asset was: where it left for a departure, where it arrived for an arrival. A fleet crossing borders needs one rule, not one per country.

An end with no timezone is not judged at all. Claiming an asset travelled out of hours without knowing what its hours were would be a guess, so the rule stays silent instead.

How it works

Blecon reads an asset's history as stops and the trips between them. A departure is a fact the moment the trip exists, so it is reported straight away. An arrival waits for the destination to settle, in the same way trip completed does.

One trip can produce two notifications, a departure and an arrival, when both ends fall outside the window and both ends is selected.

The message names the asset, the place and the local clock:

Van 12 left Cambridge Depot at 23:14 on Saturday, outside working hours

The notification carries the full trip detail, plus:

Field Meaning
trip_end departure or arrival
local_timezone The zone whose clock was read

Windows that cross midnight

Set the end time before the start time for a night shift: 22:00 to 06:00 is one window that crosses midnight, and a moment is inside it when the clock reads at or after 22:00 or before 06:00.

The weekday tested is always the day the local clock reading itself falls on. A night shift that starts Friday and ends Saturday morning needs both Friday and Saturday selected.

Parameters

Parameter Required Default Description
days No every day Weekdays on which travel is expected, 0 = Monday to 6 = Sunday
start_time No 08:00 Start of the working window, local HH:MM
end_time No 18:00 End of the working window, local HH:MM
trigger_on No either departure, arrival or either
origin_zone_id No Only trips that started in this zone
device_type No Only assets of this type
device_tags No Only assets carrying at least one of these keywords
exclude_device_tags No Never assets carrying any of these keywords

Like every rule, you can set its severity, and limit it to chosen assets with Filter by Asset Keywords in the rule form.

See the rule types reference for the full specification.

Example: catching weekend vehicle use

A contractor's vans should not move outside weekday working hours.

  1. Create an out of hours trip rule and set working hours to 07:00 to 19:00.
  2. Select Mon to Fri as the working days.
  3. Set report to departures, so one alert per unauthorised trip rather than two.
  4. Limit it to the "van" asset type, set the severity to high, and add an email notification to the fleet manager.

Notes

  • A trip that starts inside the window and ends outside it is reported once, for the arrival, when both ends is selected.
  • Daylight saving is handled per trip, from the zone at each end, so the window means the same thing in June and December.
  • Changing the trip distance or stop time changes what counts as a trip, so past trips are re-read under the new settings.

Questions? Contact Blecon support — we're happy to help.