topic Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity. in ArcGIS Velocity Questions

Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

JeffSilberberg — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:01:05 GMT

After many many attempts, I am unable to replicate the functionality of idle Detection in geoEvent within Velocity. We have tried any number of nodes and combination of nodes with no luck. CalaculateMotionStatics comes the closest but does not really provide the same functionality and the documentation for this node is ambiguous at best.

Has anyone else found any good solutions?

https://hub.arcgis.com/documents/5d8e3446736d4df299c7c96bc275d561/explore
The Track Idle Detector Processor is a supported add-on processor that can be added to a GeoEvent Service that detects if a unique TRACK_ID has moved more than a specified amount within a given time. For example, if a delivery van is expected to make delivery stops that will not exceed 120 seconds, a Track Idle Detector could be used to alert dispatch personnel if a van is stuck in a single location for more than two minutes (e.g. if they are stuck in traffic or the vehicle has mechanical problems).

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

MuneerMajid — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:25:28 GMT

Have you looked at Find Dwell Locations ?

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

JeffSilberberg — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:46:58 GMT

@MuneerMajid

No, I have not as it's not an option in my Velocity RealTime Analytic only in Big Data Analytics -- Find Locations -

https://doc.arcgis.com/en/iot/analyze/find-dwell-locations.htm

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

PeterNasuti — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 11:12:50 GMT

@JeffSilberberg Ideally the Calculate Motion Statistics tool would be the right choice at this point to achieve what I am understanding you are asking.

Assuming you have location updates coming in (people, vehicles, object in motion) and want to know when that entity is idle and not moving:

Configure the Calculate Motion Statistics tool
- Of key importance are the distance tolerance and timespan tolerance
  - "The units of the output motion statistics depend on the units specified for the Distance Tolerance and Timespan Tolerance parameters. For example, if you're specifying a Distance Tolerance value of 750 meters and a Timespan Tolerance value of 10 minutes, the output distance fields will be in meters, the output time span fields will be in minutes, and the output speed fields will contain values with units of meters per minute."
  - For another example, if you specify "1 mile" and "1 hour", if the feature movement drops below 1 mile per hour, that would be identified as a dwell by this tool and output units calculated by the tool would be in miles & hours.

This tool will generate the following attributes then related to idling:

Idling	Specifies whether the track is idle based on a distance and time threshold from the previous observation	Boolean
TotalIdleTime	Cumulative amount of time for which idling was detected	Float64
PercentageIdleTime	Percentage of time for which idling was detected	Float64

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

JeffSilberberg — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:57:10 GMT

@PeterNasuti

I have been fighting with that node for almost a year now with zero success. I was told that the documentation does not match the implementation. This is why I posted to see if others have maybe found a better way.

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

PeterNasuti — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:13:18 GMT

@JeffSilberberg The documentation for all Velocity tools matches the implementation - please feel free to reach out to me directly over email (pnasuti@esri.com) and we will get a member of the product team assigned to investigate your reported issues with the Calculate Motion Statistics tool directly.

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

JeffSilberberg — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:53:41 GMT

PM Sent --

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

PeterNasuti — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:48:15 GMT

To follow up on this thread for future community reference:

From the Velocity perspective, we will enhance the Calculate Motion Statistics presentation of the tool parameters and user experience to make the settings more clear to the user (targeting 5.3 release late 2024)
The History Depth parameter is of key importance for calculations
- This parameter is "the number of event observations to evaluate per track (includes the current observation). Motion calculations will be done based on this information."
- For example if you set a history depth parameter of 3, the min/max/sum/total/average/TotalIdleTime/PercentIdleTime calculations will be based on the current feature and the two prior features
Relevant to @JeffSilberberg 's workflow, there was a goal to obtain the "Total Idle Time" since the beginning of idling, rather than just the total idle time relevant to the History Depth parameter
- To achieve this, a Detect Incidents tool was configured following the Calculate Motion Statistics tool
  - An attribute open condition of "$feature.Idling == True" was utilized to detect and open an incident when idling had started
  - The "IncidentDuration" value generated by the Detect Incidents tool generated a stateful and accurate calculation of how long an entity had been idling
- We will examine updating the Calculate Motion Statistics tool to adjust the Total and Percentage idle time values to be fully stateful beyond just the history depth

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

MuneerMajid — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 23:44:56 GMT

@pete @JeffSilberberg Appreciate your valuable insights on this thread.

I am in a similar situation. I have some 200 odd tablets on cellular network with Operators onboard a vehicle fleet reporting their locations every 30 seconds. The operators are often driving on highways/county roads etc to fields/well pad sites. I wish to be able to detect when Operators are stationary for more than a time threshold & consequently text them a Survey123 form for responses on their detected Idle State. I am generally looking at an Idle distance tolerance of 50 Meters over a 5 minute window, and actually text them when the Idle time exceeds 2 hours in total.

I have tried various combinations to the Motion Statistics parameters over the last week or so. The Idling column is always reported false, and %IdlingTime 0 even if vehicles are fully stationary within the defined history depth. I see that the Speed, Acceleration, Distance & all other motions stats are reported 0 for such vehicles as expected, but Idling is still calculated as False . Actual vehicles alone, I have even tried to calculate the Motion Statistics from stationary devices like PCs at an office, and the results are the same. This is a bit of an annoyance and I cant seem to overcome this issue in order to get the expected output from this tool.

I am perhaps missing a trick in plain sight here, would appreciate any inputs to overcome this.

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

JeffSilberberg — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 13:33:51 GMT

@MuneerMajid

Sorry, I am still struggling with this as well. If there is a magic trick, I have not found it either.

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

PeterNasuti — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 13:07:27 GMT

@MuneerMajid Can you please log an Esri support case with the questions you are still facing with this tool? We will also get a Velocity product engineer to further assist as needed. @JeffEismanGIS

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

MuneerMajid — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:08:43 GMT

Thanks Peter, I have logged the below ticket via the support site -
https://my.esri.com/#/support/cases/tech-cases?caseNumber=03707071

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

MuneerMajid — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 19:11:15 GMT

I have had a ticket open with ESRI support since 8/20. There has been no movement on it all this while and the designated analyst has only told me that the product team has been reviewing this internally. Pretty disappointed at this point at the inability of the Motion Statistics to deliver what's expected.

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

JeffSilberberg — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 19:41:08 GMT

@MuneerMajid @PeterNasuti

Sorry, I do not have an update from them either at this time --

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

Joanna_Nishimura — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 19:50:07 GMT

I wanted to provide an update on this issue. I worked with MuneerMajid to further investigate this issue with the Calculate Motion Statistics tool. The original question was around getting the Calculate Motion Statistics tool to output Idling values that were True. We took a closer look at the workflow and clarified some of the tool parameters. For Calculate Motion Statistics to output Idling status of TRUE, the following 2 statements must both be true:

TimeSpan > TimespanTolerance
Distance < DistanceTolerance

Where TimeSpan is the time elapsed between the previous and current observation and TimespanTolerance is the Timespan Tolerance value entered in the tool. Distance is the distance travelled between the previous and current observation and DistanceTolerance is the Distance Tolerance value entered in the tool. If either of the above statements is false, then the tool will output an Idling status of FALSE for that point.

We talked through the end goal of the workflow and decided that with some fine-tuning of the parameters, it may be possible to get the Calculate Motion Statistics tool to output the desired results or there could be an alternative workflow using Calculate Fields tool with TrackFunctions and the Detect Incidents tool.

Re: Replicate geoEvent Idle Detection Functionality in Velocity.

MuneerMajid — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 18:55:11 GMT

The solution provided by Joanna has worked well for me thus far. I think it is safe to conclude that you can tweak Motion Statistics do exactly what it promises, although we agree the documentation may not be easy to apply right off the bat.

There were several tricks that I learned along the way during my discussions with Joanna for effectively putting motion statistics to good use. In my case, I was looking to flag vehicles which were Idle for more than 60 minutes. How you translate 'IDLE' is of great importance here, and my definition of it can be different than yours or ESRI's. I will try to elaborate on this a bit for the greater cause -

For starters, IDLING detection within a custom time span is not reported by the tool in a way that's straight forward and easy to transcribe. Lets say in my case, I wish to detect vehicles which have traveled less than 500 Meters Geodetic over a 5 minute time span while I am gathering vehicle locations at every 30 second intervals. That implies that my distance tolerance is 500 Meters, but time span tolerance cannot be 5 minutes. If you put this combination in the tool, you are always going to get IDLING = FALSE. So rather than visualizing Idling over a 5 minute span, we viewed this as 10 individual observations each 30 seconds in duration. And also split our distance tolerance into 50 Meters. All in all you are trying to come up with a strategy to ensure that the following two conditions are always met for IDLING to be TRUE -

1) Distance < Distance Tolerance (50 Meter)
2) Timespan Tolerance < Timespan (30 seconds)

I ended up putting my Timespan tolerance to a arbitrary number of 28 seconds for it to satisfy condition#2 at all times. I still dont agree with the way Timespan Tolerance is factored into the tool, for you can have more real time situations where the timespan is lot shorter (for eg. A Fleet of Vehicles sending their location at a timespan of every 1-2 seconds). In such cases I dont think your motion statistics IDLING output will be reliable if you are to ensure that Time span tolerance is as small as 0.5 seconds or so. For a more precise implementation of IDLING detection, we should have the capability of not comparing just the last observation, instead over a history depth. In other words, I should be able to get the tool to spit IDLING status over a time interval of 1 minute inspite of the observations being just seconds or milliseconds apart. Motion Statistics IDLING would be a little more powerful in my opinion if it can do cumulative IDLING analysis over the history depth rather than just 2 observations. What's also another interesting finding is that IDLING seems to be the only attribute in Motion Statistics that ignores the history depth for calculations and relies on the most recent observation, all other properties are reported over the history depth like speed, acceleration etc. IDLE duration and IDLE Percentage it must be stated do consider history depth which is understandable.

Joanna however provided an alternate approach as well to factor in my above concerns. She demonstrated the use of track functions in arcade to calculate instantaneous speed and I like this approach as well. All in all, I was able to achieve what I needed with a combination of a few different checks and balances. I wouldn't have been able to tackle this requirement without Joanna's help though for I wasn't getting far by solely referring the documentation.

I am happy to share any further insights shall anyone have questions about Motion Statistics.