What is After Hours Tracking?
The usage profile of an asset will often vary significantly between two distinct time periods: “Work Hours” and “After Hours.” The tracking requirements during each time period, then, are usually significantly different.
Typically, during work hours we are interested in locating assets and tracking key metrics such as run hours. While after hours, we are more interested in theft prevention and recovery. Work Hours/After Hours periods can be set on our battery-powered devices to facilitate this.
The device having knowledge of these periods allows:
The device to be set up so that it is sensitive to movement during after-hours periods, to allow for timely movement alerts to prevent theft.
Battery life to be used efficiently – providing extra detail and updates when needed, and fewer updates when it is not required.
For example, a common scenario:
During Work Hours
During work hours, assets are under heavy use by various operators. However, we only need a few updates per day, to assist the operations team in locating the assets at specific times of the day. During this timeframe, we would set the device to update periodically (i.e. every 4 hours).
After Hours
If an asset is moved after hours, it might be because someone is trying to steal or tamper with it. So during after hours, we can set the device to update immediately when movement is detected, and continue updating while on the move so that we can track its movement and activate Recovery Mode (Live Tracking) for retrieval.
In normal operation, there is a Wake Filter in place on our battery-powered devices. This requires a few seconds of accelerometer movement to be detected before the device sends a movement alert, preventing false trip starts in most cases. This Wake Filter can be optionally disabled during after hours periods – so movement alerts are sent in the shortest possible time after hours – such as a trailer being unhitched from a vehicle. Under normal operation, this would not set off an alert (but starting the car and moving the trailer a few meters would).
Without the ability to set after hours periods, in order to ensure that the movement alert is sent on time if the asset is stolen, we would have to set aggressive parameters all day – which would generate a large number of unnecessary uploads and consume extra data and battery life.
