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Trip abandoned

Know when an asset goes quiet on the road. A trip abandoned rule fires when an asset stops reporting in the middle of a trip: you know it left, you know where it was last seen, and you do not know that it arrived.

Use it to catch a consignment that fell off the network, a tag whose battery died in transit, or a vehicle that left the covered area and did not come back.

Why this is not an inactivity rule

An inactivity rule tells you an asset has not reported for a while. It cannot tell you whether the asset is parked in the yard with poor coverage or halfway to a customer. This rule only looks at assets that were moving when they went silent, which is the case worth waking someone for.

It is also the pair of trip completed. That rule deliberately stays silent about an abandoned trip, because announcing an arrival nobody can support would be worse than saying nothing.

How it works

Blecon reads an asset's history as stops and the trips between them. A trip stays in progress only while there is reason to think it still is. After the workspace's abandonment time with no positions, the trip is closed at its last known point, with no destination, and marked abandoned. That is the moment this rule fires.

The abandonment time is a workspace setting under Tracking then Trips, and can be overridden per asset type. It is not set per rule, because it decides what the trip itself is, not who hears about it.

Each abandoned trip produces exactly one notification per rule.

The message names the asset, the trip it was on, and where it was last seen:

Van 12 stopped reporting during a trip from Cambridge Depot, last seen near 52.1050, 0.1234

The notification carries the full trip detail, plus:

Field Meaning
abandoned_after_seconds The silence threshold that closed the trip
last_position_at The last position recorded on the trip, in UTC
last_known_location Where that position was

Parameters

Every parameter is optional. A rule with none set tells you about every abandoned trip.

Parameter Description
min_distance_meters Only trips at least this far, measured to the last known position
min_duration_seconds Only trips that ran at least this long
origin_zone_id Only trips that started in this zone
device_type Only assets of this type
device_tags Only assets carrying at least one of these keywords
exclude_device_tags Never assets carrying any of these keywords

A destination filter is rejected: an abandoned trip has no known destination, so the filter could never match.

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 a lost consignment

A logistics operator wants to know when a tagged pallet stops reporting on the road, but does not want to hear about pallets sitting in a warehouse.

  1. Create a trip abandoned rule with min_distance_meters set to 5000, so yard moves are ignored.
  2. Limit it to the "pallet" asset type.
  3. Set the severity to high, so it raises an alert someone must resolve.
  4. Add an email notification to the transport desk.

Notes

  • The trip's end is the last time the asset was actually seen, not the moment the threshold ran out. The alert arrives later than the event it describes, by exactly the abandonment time.
  • If the asset starts reporting again, the trip does not reopen. A new trip begins from where it resumed.
  • Shortening the abandonment time makes more trips abandoned. Lengthening it makes fewer. Both re-read past trips under the new setting.

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