TruETA Agent overview

Requirements:

Your TMW Operations database must have the TruETA license applied.

TruETA Agent is a trip-planning tool that calculates an estimated time of arrival (ETA) for each stop along a truck’s route. It notifies you when a tractor is likely to arrive late at a stop.

You can set up three levels of late notifications:

  • Warning

  • Alert

  • Critical

TruETA Agent considers all of the following when calculating stop ETAs:

  • Vehicle’s current location
    Location based on the GPS coordinates of the tractor’s check calls.

  • Driver Hours-of-Service (HOS)
    TruETA Agent calculates time for required driver rest breaks and calculates remaining Hours-of-Service at each destination.

    Hours-of-Service is calculated by the Trimble Maps Hours-of-Service planning engine. Calculations are based on the hours recorded in the Driver Hours of Service window in TMW Operations.

    For information on using Chaining Trips to predict HoS and on-time deliveries, see Chaining trips together.

  • Real-time and predictive traffic speeds
    Traffic speeds are calculated for each assigned route by the Trimble Maps truck routing engine.

TruETA Agent runs calculations on one of the following:

  • Based on a user-defined schedule

  • Manually as needed

TruETA Agent uses Trimble Maps' commercial mapping platform to visualize live traffic flows, as well as weather overlays of current conditions including radar, cloud cover, alerts, and road surface conditions to identify potential scheduling issues quickly.

TruETA Agent can run calculations for all of your non-completed trips. However, the calculations are most precise for trips that have a driver, tractor, or a carrier assigned and have check calls recorded. For these trips, the system makes additional calls to Trimble Maps Web Services that result in more thorough ETA calculations.

  1. You can use TruETA Agent with: TMW Operations and TMWSuite.

  2. TruETA Agent is a separately licensed add-on feature that must be purchased from Trimble Transportation. For details, contact your Sales representative.

In addition to calculating tractor ETAs based on GPS readings, you can also set up the system to monitor the following occurrences:

  • No Assignment
    Monitors whether resources are assigned a user-defined amount of time before the trip’s scheduled start

  • Planned start
    Monitors whether the trip starts within a user-defined number of hours of the planned start time

  • Early windows
    Monitors whether tractors arrive at a stop earlier than the times specified for the stop

    The system compares the dates/times recorded in the stop’s Arrival and Earliest columns.

  • Late windows
    Monitors whether tractors arrive at a stop later than the times specified for the stop

    The system compares the dates/times recorded in the stop’s Arrival and Latest columns.

Activating the TruETA Agent module

Starting with TMW Operations 2019.4, the default TruETA module is TruETA and not the TruETA Agent module. If your company would rather use the TruETA Agent module instead of the TruETA module, you need to do the following:

  • Activate the TruETA Agent module

    1. Set [TruETA]AutoProcessTruEtaInOps=N in your TTS50.

    2. Open the tmwoperations.exe.config file in a text editor, such as Notepad++.

    3. Change SystemsLinkEnabled=Y to SystemsLinkEnabled=N.

  • Install and set up the TruETA Agent.

  1. You must have system administrator rights to make these changes.

  2. When you activate the TruETA Agent module, you deactivate TruETA.