Rules overview
Rules are conditions that outline the ideal behavior for your fleet. When an asset or driver breaks a rule, it generates an event that can be used to send notifications.
Rules are the building blocks in MyGeotab for monitoring the driving behavior of your fleet. They help you keep track of your fleet’s behavior in several key areas, including safety, compliance, productivity, sustainability, and fleet optimization.
When an asset or driver in your fleet breaks a rule, it generates an event that is recorded in your database. This data can be used to monitor the overall behavior of your fleet. You can also set up conditions to be notified when events are generated, allowing you to target undesirable behavior and act quickly to solve problems.
You can access the Rules feature by navigating to . The Rules page allows you to:
Add new rules or edit built-in rules.
Reprocess your data to apply a new rule to past data.
Create and edit templates to customize your notifications.
Create distribution lists for notifications.
Manage recipients for notifications.
Rule categories
MyGeotab uses categories to organize built-in rules and help you find what you're looking for faster.
Built-in rules in MyGeotab are organized into categories based on their usage for ease of access:
Safety rules: These manage safe driving behavior. They can also help you proactively handle risky driving.
Productivity rules: These manage driver efficiency. They let you monitor things like late arrivals, early departures, and unauthorized stops.
Fleet optimization rules: These help manage behavior such as speeding and idling, which keeps fuel costs low.
Device rules: These notify you about any issues related to the devices used in your fleet.
Compliance rules: These help track compliance issues, such as missing asset inspections and HOS exemptions.
Sustainability rules: These are designed to help you manage your carbon footprint. They can also help you support electric vehicles in your fleet.
Video: These rules depend on the installation of camers in your vehicles, and track driver behavior such as distracted driving, phone usage, or smoking. They also track camera issues such as tampering or adjustments.
System rules: These track critical system errors.
Material management rules: These manage assets that spread solid, pre-wet, or liquid material.
GPS-based safety rules
GPS-based safety rules use GPS data to monitor safety events in your fleet.
Harsh acceleration
Harsh breaking
Harsh cornering
Speeding
The original harsh event rules are sensor-based rules that rely on the accelerometer to detect events. The second set of harsh event rules, marked as New in the rule name, are GPS-based rules that use GPS data to provide more precise results.
Data differences in sensor-based and GPS-based safety rules
Using GPS data helps filter out noise from road conditions. For example, consider a scenario in which a vehicle drives over a pot hole. Using the previous rules, driving over a pot hole would cause a spike on the accelerometer sensor, triggering a harsh event. This event would be a false positive, because no harsh driving actually occurred - the spike was caused by road conditions.
Using GPS data, the new rules measure the vehicle's movements between two points in space, and can accurately determine that the vehicle's speed did not change and no event occurred. Even though the vehicle would still register the spike on the accelerometer sensor as the it went over the pot hole, no event would be recorded in MyGeotab since the spike would be filtered out as noise from road conditions.
Users who have previously monitored events produced by the sensor-based safety rules may notice that the GPS-based safety rules produce a higher number of events. This is due to the rules' ability to capture less severe harsh driving events due to filtering out false positives. It is an intentional result of moving to GPS-based rules, intended to allow fleet administrators to monitor less severe events in order to coach risky driving behavior before it escalates into a major accident.
G-force thresholds for GPS-based rules
G-force thresholds are automatically calculated for the GPS-based harsh event rules. You do not need to set the thresholds yourself, or add multiple rules for different vehicle types. All vehicle types are managed automatically within the built-in rules.
The following thresholds were determined via safety research, predictive modeling, and real-world population analysis.
| Vehicle class | Harsh acceleration | Harsh braking | Harsh cornering |
|---|---|---|---|
| Passenger | 0.300 | 0.300 | 0.420 |
| Medium passenger vehicle | 0.280 | 0.280 | 0.380 |
| Bus | 0.280 | 0.280 | 0.360 |
| Light-duty truck | 0.280 | 0.280 | 0.320 |
| Medium-duty truck | 0.240 | 0.240 | 0.300 |
| Heavy-duty truck | 0.200 | 0.200 | 0.240 |
| Other | 0.260 | 0.260 | 0.320 |
Speeding rule threshold
The new speeding rule triggers when the system detects a vehicle exceeds the posted speed limit by 20% for more than 5 seconds. Unlike the previous version of the speeding rule, this threshold is not customizable.