Trips and stops
Read an asset's day as a short list of journeys: where it went, when it left, how long each one took, and where it waited.
A position history answers "where was this tag at 14:20". Most operational questions are not that. They are "did the van reach the site", "how many runs did it make", "why did that delivery take four hours". Trips answer those, because Blecon Track segments the position history for you and stores the result.
Stops, trips and pauses
Blecon Track reads each asset's history as stops and the trips between them.
- A stop is a period when the asset was still, at one place.
- A trip is one movement between two stops.
- A pause is a stationary period too short to be a stop. It stays attached to the trip it happened inside.
The pause matters. Without it, a driver's lunch break would split one delivery run into two trips, and a wait at a barrier would split it again. A pause keeps the time visible without moving the trip boundary.
A place is a zone where the asset stopped inside one, and a coordinate otherwise. This is what lets one timeline cover an outdoor run on GPS and an arrival inside an indoor zone.
The Trips page
Go to Trips to see every trip across the workspace, newest departure first.
Each row names the asset, where it came from and where it got to. It also carries the departure and arrival times, the distance and the duration.
The Route column draws the shape of the journey. A straight run, a return to base and a circuit round a yard are recognisable without opening the trip.
Filter the list by time range, asset type, single asset, or minimum distance. Export CSV downloads every trip the filters select, not only the rows on screen.
Trips a rule might act on are visible here too:
- A trip still in progress shows no arrival time. The asset is moving now.
- An abandoned trip is one where the asset went silent on the way. Blecon Track records where it was last seen, and does not claim it arrived.
One trip in detail
Select a trip to open it. The map draws the recorded route with both ends marked.
The itinerary lists every place in order: the departure, each pause the asset made, then the arrival. Between each pair it gives the distance and the duration of that leg. Select any place to focus the map on it. A place that is a zone also links to the zone itself.
Below the itinerary, the record holds the trip's identifier, its confidence, and the two thresholds it was cut with. Those thresholds are part of the record because the same history under a different trip distance is a different set of trips.
If the asset reports temperature, a chart plots the readings against the trip, with the places marked on it. This answers whether a consignment stayed cold, and where it was when it did not.
An asset's own trips
The asset page carries a Trips section, listing that asset's recent journeys. Beside it, a Travelled Together section lists the assets that made the same journey. Two assets travelled together when both made a trip between the same two places, arriving at about the same time.
What counts as a trip
Two workspace settings decide where one trip ends and the next begins. Go to Settings, then Tracking, then Trips.
| Setting | Means | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Trip distance | How far apart two stops must be to count as different places. Movement shorter than this is not a trip. | 1 km |
| Stop time | How long an asset must be still before the movement either side counts as two trips. Anything shorter becomes a pause. | 90 minutes |
One pair of numbers rarely suits a whole fleet. A forklift that never leaves a 300 m yard and a truck crossing a country do not agree on what a trip is. Set Per asset type overrides for either value, and leave a box empty to use the workspace value.
{% hint style="warning" %} Changing either setting re-cuts the trips already recorded, because the old ones were split under the old numbers. Assets are re-read in batches, so a large workspace takes a few hours to finish. Links to trips made before the change stop working: a trip that starts somewhere else is a different trip.
What a trip does and does not claim
Blecon Track reports how good each number is rather than presenting all of them as equal.
- Duration runs from the last time the asset was seen at its origin to the first time it was seen at its destination. Both ends are evidence, so a tag that reports rarely produces a duration that is an upper bound. Where a quarter of a trip or more passed unseen, the trip page says so under the figure.
- Distance is the straight line between the two stops. Route distance is how far the asset actually travelled, and appears only when enough of the route was recorded.
- Confidence grades the route by the largest gap in reporting. A trip with a three-hour silence in the middle is reported with low confidence and no route distance, rather than with a fabricated one.
- An approximate distance means a zone's centre stood in for a missing position at one end. The number is useful, and it is not a measurement.
- A tag that goes quiet mid-trip produces an abandoned trip, not an arrival.
Trips in your own systems
Six alert rules fire on trips, so your systems can react to arrivals and exceptions instead of segmenting a position stream themselves:
- Trip completed — an asset finished a trip.
- Trip abandoned — an asset went silent on the way.
- Trip overdue — a trip is running longer than it should.
- Wrong destination — an asset arrived somewhere it should not have.
- Unscheduled stop — an asset paused somewhere unexpected.
- Out of hours trip — an asset moved outside working hours.
The Tracker API serves the same records. It lists trips across the workspace, fetches one trip with its route, lists stops, and exports the filtered list as CSV.
The MCP server exposes trips to an AI assistant. Ask it which trips your vans made yesterday, and how far each one travelled.