Note: users of the old "Road usage alarm" now have a much easier way to define prohibited roads and set the corresponding alarm. But don't worry, the definitions you have previously created were migrated so that they will still work. Please check this article to know how compatibility between the old and the new way to define prohibited roads was maintained.
How to configure and control a prohibited road
When you need to define a prohibited road or highway, start by creating a corridor around that road. In the example below, we want our trucks to avoid using the A10 highway, in France, between Poitiers and Bordeaux, because the N10 national road is a perfectly good alternative and we can save a lot of money by avoiding tolls.
Setting up and controlling a prohibited road is done in two steps:
- Create a corridor around the road you want to prohibited;
- Create an Area entrance alarm that detects when your vehicles go inside this corridor.
Creating a corridor
Start by creating a path between Poitiers south (highway node) and Bordeaux northe (another highway node).
This is the part of the highway we want to avoid. As you can see, there is an alternative road, N10, east of the highway, which our drivers can use, with no tolls.
The next step is to create a corridor around the path we just defined. For that, right click on the blue path and choose Create corridor.
A window will pop up giving you some options:
| Field | Description |
| Name | Use this to give a proper name to the highway/road you want your vehicles to avoid. |
| Width | This is the width of the corridor around the road. We suggest you use a 0.5Km width, which is enough to completely involve the road. |
| Create alarm | Choose none. We will create the alarm manually as shown below. |
These are the options we chose in our example:
In the end, remember to Save the new corridor.
Creating an alarm
Now that we have created a corridor around the prohibited section of the highway, we want to set up an alarm that will trigger if a vehicle is found inside that corridor. Here's how.
In Administration > Alarms, choose Add new. Then choose the alarm type. It should be Area entrance. Give it a name that suggests what it really detects. For instance:
Then select all the vehicles to which you want the alarm to be applied. In our case, we selected all the vehicles:
Click Apply to create the new alarm and configure it.
Now we need to define two things before the alarm is prepared.
Choose the Restrictions tab, on the left side, so you are shown the corresponding options:
There are two options that you must use to configure the road usage alarme correctly. The other options depend on your specific needs, so study them carefully (for a full description on the Area entrance alarm see this article).
Start by indicating which corridor you want to associate to this alarm. For that, in the Geographical panel (mid panel), choose Only inside > Corridors:
Then, from the list of corridors, choose the corridor you create before:
Apply the selected corridor.
Before we save this alarm, there is another option we should use. If we simply prohibit the vehicle to be located inside this corridor, it might happen that a vehicle is simply moving on a bridge over the highway, for instance, and Frotcom collects the GPS position at that exact moment. This would trigger the alarm, when in fact the vehicle was not on the highway.
To minimize such false alarms, we recommend that you enter an additional condition: that the vehicles be a few consecutive minutes inside the corridor, before the alarm is actually triggered. So, if the vehicle is crossing a bridge over the highway, even if coincidentally a position is received inside the corridor, the second one will already be outside the corridor and the alarm will not be triggered.
To do that, simply choose a proper Trigger delay in minutes, in the first tab, Time. In the example below, we chose 2 minutes, which is usually enough:
In the end, remember to Save your new alarm.
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