How To Guide: Geo-fences

Geofences can be utilised in a number of ways that enable you to track asset details such as time spent inside/outside of, distance or hours travelled inside of specific locations. You can also use Geofences to manually set speed limits for areas, and update location based data to a custom string.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Setting up a Geo-Fence
  • Creating a Geofence from the Live View or Trip History View
  • Creating a Geofence through the Admin Menu
  • For advanced options click on Show advanced options.
• Tracking Asset Activity in Geo-Fences (Time on Site)
• Setting Up a Geo-Fence Alert
• Alerting based on a group of Geofences
• More complex Geofence Alerts
• Route Tracking/Alerts - Alert when Leaving All Geofences
• FAQS
  • When you have one Geofence inside another, which takes priority?
  • If I set a project when an asset enters a specific area, how do I change it back to the initial project once it leaves?

Setting up a Geo-Fence

Creating a Geofence from the Live View or Trip History View

To set up a Geofence from the Live View or Trip History View, right click to display the menu options of Create Geofence Here or Hide Geofences

This link then opens up to the main geofence screen with the desired area zoomed to fit

Creating a Geofence through the Admin Menu

1. From the Main Menu, click on the Geo-fences Icon
2. Click "New Geo-Fence"
3. You can type an address into the "search for location" bar and hit enter to be taken to that location on the map

You can now adjust the zoom level using the plus(+) and (-) functions on the bottom right corner of the map, and once you see the area that you wish to create a zone for, use your cursor to click points outlining the shape, ensuring that your last point meets the first point you created, as show below:

Once you have clicked on your starting point the geo-fence shape will appear and you can adjust the shape by dragging any of the nodes shown by arrows below:

Lastly, name your geo-fence and then click save, now the name given to your geo-fence will appear in all of your trip history and reports.

For advanced options click on Show advanced options.

These are the advanced settings:

TG will record stats for the asset in the selected Geo-Fences. This information is available in 2 reports:

1. Asset Geofence History Summary: provides a summary of Geo-Fence activity. Expect 1 line per Asset and Geo-Fence combination, summarising the information over a period.
2. Asset Geofence History Detail: provides a more detailed view of Geo-Fence activity, itemising each visit to the Geo-Fence and providing statistics about the visit.

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Setting Up a Geo-Fence Alert

A Geo-Fence alert is one of the pre-set up alerts so creating one is super simple. On the top menu bar, click on Admin >> Alerts and then select "New Alert Wizard" and you'll see this screen.

1. Step one is selecting the Geo-Fence alert from the drop down menu
2. Select your Geo-Fence Name under the left box and choose either to send the alert when an asset enters or leaves the Geo-Fence, click Next
3. Select the Asset(s) that the alert will apply to, click Next
4. Nominate the destination contact for the Alert
5. Name your Geo-Fence, Click Save

Alerting based on a group of Geofences

When you assign the conditions in the Alert, you can assign a Project group of Geofences instead of multiple individual geofences.

This scenario could be useful if you have multiple sites with assets travelling between them, or having assets that you want an alert on when any of them leave one of the sites. It greatly simplifies needing to select potentially hundreds of Geofences for an alert. 

To assign the geofences to a project, select the project from the dropdown in admin -> geofences -> edit -> advanced options

• To create a project, go to Admin -> Projects

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More complex Geofence Alerts

We can also make use of the New Alert (Advanced) function to build more complex geofence alerts. 

There are 5 conditions to alert on as shown. We will discuss the last in the next section. 

They are subtly different. ALL Telematics Guru alerts keep track of the alert 'state' - so it is important to note for example, using the "Inside Geo-Fence(s)" option will not generate an alert on every single log that an asset is inside the Geofence. It will send only 1 when it first enters. The asset will need to leave and then re-enter to generate a second. 

So when used in isolation, this has the exact same behaviour as the "Entering Geo-Fence(s)" option. The difference comes when we combine multiple alert conditions. E.g. 

The above would alert whenever the speed goes above 40km/h and we are inside the geofence. We'd get a subsequent alert if the speed temporarily dipped back below 40, then above again. 

If instead we were to change to "Entering Geo-Fence(s)" option - we'd only get an alert if we were doing above 40km/h at the time we crossed the Geo-Fence boundary - which typically wouldn't be something we'd be interested in, we want to know all speeding events inside the Geo-Fence like the image.

To further illustrate the concept, the below would alert if an asset leaves a geofence during the specified time. 

Route Tracking Alerts - Alert when Leaving All Geofences

This condition can be used to send an alert if an asset deviates from a pre-determined route. Future improvements to this functionality are planned. To set up, we simply create our geofences (i.e. multiple along a route) - and add them to the alert with this condition. Then the alert will treat them all as one large geofence, only sending an alert if we leave all of them. 

For example, we have drawn the following 3 Geofences - DMA Office, Path To Station, and Train Station. These mark out each location and the route between the two. 

Then we can create our alert, which will alert should we leave all 3 geofences. 

Alternatively, we could add all the geofences to a project to make setting up the alert a bit simpler (particularly if we had many geofences and routes)

Finally, we may want to select Exclude From Trip Assignment for some of the geofences along the route - if we don't want to see these names in our reports all the time, and would prefer street addresses. 

FAQS

When you have one Geofence inside another, which takes priority?

Geo Fences with a Higher priority are shown preference over those with a Lower priority. Where two Geo-Fences overlap with the same priority, the fence with the smallest area will be shown preference. 

If I set a project when an asset enters a specific area, how do I change it back to the initial project once it leaves?

If you set a geofence to assign an asset to a project when entering a geofence, you can have a larger geofence around it to re-assign the initial project when it departs the inner-geofence.

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