In Visibility Hub, it's all about detecting stop visits using state of the art technologies and involving different stakeholder on the supply chain. We want to give you some insights into the methodology and explain what it takes to accurately track transports.

One common definition is:

"A geofence is a virtual boundary defined around a real-world geographic area. This boundary can be dynamically generated, as in a radius around a point location, or a predefined set of boundaries. When a device that is equipped with GPS, RFID, Wi-Fi, or cellular data enters or exits this boundary, it triggers an event."

Such a triggered event tells Visibility Hub that the vehicle is now near a stop location, which is primarily used for:

​Stop visit detection: A vehicle takes a break inside a geofence which is used to detect a stop arrival as well as a vehicle leaving the geofence, which is used to detect stop departures. A break is defined as "the vehicle spends some time in the geofence without movement". Have a look here to learn more about this topic.

Limited vs. standard visibility sharing: In order to know when Visibility can share it's standard visibility (which in short means the track on the map as well as the ETA for the next stop) across the involved stakeholders, first and last stop visits of a given transports are important. Have a look here to learn more about the differentiation of limited vs. standard visibility.

When Visibility Hub receives stop addresses within a transport, these addresses need to be converted first into geocoordinates (latitude and longitude). During this process, the address data quality is evaluated, which results in different geofence sizes: The better the address quality, the smaller the geofence. And vice versa: If the address quality is bad, the geofence size will be bigger.

The reason for this behavior is: If the location couldn't be exactly determined based on the input stop address data provided by the customer, we try to still catch the stop visit, even though the location might not be 100% correct.

Example for good address quality:

--> All address components are provided, the order is maintained, no typos or abbreviations.

Example for bad address quality:

--> Address components missing, order is mixed up, street is abbreviated, not useable numbers.

The tradeoff to make is: Creating a smaller geofence in order to have more accurate arrival/departure times based on stop visit detection but potentially missing a stop visit vs. having bigger geofences in order to at least capture the visit but having less accurate arrival/departure times.

Note: All geofences that are created based on input address data are circular geofences. Polygonal geofences can be created by the user, have a look below how to get there!

Customers, who provide the transport data to Visibility Hub, can use their own geofence definitions to configure shapes and sizes.

Note that you need an admin user role in Visibility Hub to be able to customize locations.

You can customize your locations in various ways:

You can customize locations in two ways:

Not everything goes right all the time when it comes to transport tracking:

Stop addresses might not be correctly defined, the execution stop order is different compared to what is defined in the transport plan, GPS data is received too late or not accurate enough to mention a few common ones.

The Visibility Hub internal tracking engine offers features to track as many transports as possible, even though the input data might not be as accurate as expected:

... and many more!

If you notice a behavior that you can't explain yourself, reach out to our support, they will be happy to assist you.