I am looking to discern when snow plows are plowing parking lots. Our plows don't have a plow up/down sensor, so I have to use some logic. Is it possible to use the "Find Dwell Locations" of my tracks and determine this? Anybody have any other suggestions?
@ArmstKP Thanks for reaching out and asking your question! There are many different ways this could be approached and your analytics could be designed using ArcGIS Velocity. Much of this depends on your goals and desired outputs/outcomes:
You can do all of the above, or any combination of the above when building up your analytics. Feel free to provide additional details about your desired outcome/output goals.
@PeterNasuti Thanks Peter!
I am trying to accomplish your last bullet point. I want to know when a snow plow is within or very near a parking lot polygon, then create a convex hull from the VehicleTracks using the Find Dwell Feature Tool, then if that intersects with the parking lot polygon, I will then take the timestamp of when it was processed and calculate the lastserviced field with that date. I have tested this and my model never outputs any records, even though if I look at my tracks it should trigger an output:
@ArmstKP Thanks for the additional info!
Looking at the metrics of your analytic, "Find Dwell Features" has 0 records, so we can identify this tool as the "blocker" to explain why your model has no outputs. This tool more than likely has no outputs because of your properties "distance tolerance: 500 feet" and "time span tolerance: 15 minutes". When a plow truck is moving around plowing a parking lot, it is still in motion and getting bread crumb updates at distance and time span greater than the tolerances specified. Therefore, none of your AVL track points satisfy a "dwell" per this criteria, so this tool has no output. You could adjust the distance/time tolerance to better identify parking lot plowing speed as a dwell, but this could capture many other events when the plow truck is merely driving slow or plowing elsewhere. Rather than diving into analytic design for that tool configuration, lets consider a few things.
From your description, it sounds like the fundamental goal is to update the parking lot polygons with their lastserviced field with the last date of service. In this reply, I am moving forward with that assumption, but if that assumption is wrong please correct me. This is a common AVL/geospatial scenario that has been addressed by various implementations of the below logic to identify/recognize vehicle visits to certain locations.
Consider the following design approach as an option:
There are many ways to design and configure analytics in ArcGIS Velocity, and I have provided the above as an example that has led to success for other users for similar use cases.
@PeterNasuti Thanks a million for the detailed steps. One question, though? In step 3.3.2.1.2, do you mean the IncidentDuration field, not the DwellDuration field?
@ArmstKP Yes my mistake! Thanks for catching that - I will edit my above post for the future reference of others as well.
@ArmstKP The metrics show 0 features passed Detect Incidents - this would require additional information to investigate:
If the above does not lead to findings to resolve this, you may be better served by opening a support ticket with Esri Support Services to have a call/screenshare for further investigation.
A little off topic, but what device are you using in your plow trucks that you can not get a Telemetry point from for Up/Down ?
@JeffSilberberg We currently aren't using any up/down sensors. We are testing and looking into them right now, but there are many issues with them. We are using speed, location and vehicle type to determine if a route has been plowed. We plow park trails, so we do not get a lot of vehicles traversing segments other than when they are plowing, so it makes it easier.....