Occasionally for large customers, I will print out a large overview of a day’s data, since we have a large format plotter which can print enormous (3 1/2 by 6 foot) images.
I had a few minutes the other day & decided to do this for a large Las Vegas based customer when I noticed what looked like an anomaly in their data. There was a long line connecting two position “pins” which was not “OK.” Since we report location every 2 minutes, it looked like the vehicle magically transported itself 8 miles away.
I hoped this wasn’t a problem with their vehicle’s GPS Tracking device so I looked at it, & realized it may have been towed to that facility. This customer has lots of large delivery vehicles and there’s no reason they couldn’t have used one to “deliver” another without the vehicle being turned on (maybe to save gas, or they didn’t have a driver to take it over there).
Here is the image with the anomaly:
Zooming down, it is simple to identify which vehicle this was — LVD-15405-18, with a 59 minute ‘stop’ (tow) beginning at 4:12 PM.
Now here is the hard part — there are tens of thousands of points — we need to filter out ONLY the vehicle which may have been towed, and the vehicles which could have potentially towed it, as well as just the data points from the time it was towed. Otherwise there is simply too much data to be able to see what happened here and get to the bottom of things. Thankfully that’s what GPS Insight allows our customers to do very easily, using something called the “time slider” and by using the inherent strengths of Google Earth.
We go to the opposite side of the long by clicking the next point in that vehicle’s history, an idle stop (blue) at 5:11 PM, where the vehicle “appeared” spontaneously, and see there was only one other truck there that day — that makes it easy to view ONLY those two trucks at once. One (our towed one with the long line) has a orangish-red line, and the other vehicle ahs a green line and is truck LVD-40209-RIG:
Because we know the 2 trucks, we can easily look at ONLY their history and because we know the vehicle was towed between 16:12 and 17:11 (4:12 PM and 5:11 PM) we can use the “time slider” to show ONLY the location “points” during that time & a little bit before & after. It shows exactly what I thought — the vehicle “towing” the other vehicle leaves that location shortly after it stops at 4:12, and arrives just a couple minutes before it starts again at its new location at 5:11 PM.
I have put big red arrows to show the direction it traveled to get there, and have highlighed the fact that it was just pulling in at 5:05 PM, 6 minutes before the vehicle was started up again, probably to back it off of the large delivery vehicle it was parked upon:
Another way to quantify this would be to create a “TowStart” and “TowStop” landmark at each of the two ends of the line and then run a route report for them for that day to see which vehicles went from one to the other — this is done by clicking on “Landmark: Create from point” which brings up this screen to easily place/adjust your landmarks.
Routes are a good topic for another blog article, so I’ll just show you how easy it is to create a route in our system, and the next article I will cover this topic in greater detail:
In a nutshell, with no knowledge of this customer’s business activity today, I was able to gain insight into an event which occurred to one of their trucks. It was towed by another one of their trucks, and evidence of this fact took only a couple minutes to get out of tens of thousands of data points, using GPS Insight. That’s what we do — give our customers (and sometimes ourselves) insight into what their fleets are doing at all times.
Thanks,
Rob.