To contain the corona virus, many states have reintroduced border controls or closed borders completely.
This resulted in long queues and long transit times at the borders during the week of 16-22.03.2020, which also led to long transit times. As of today, the situation has improved again, but should be closely monitored.
Therefore we have joined forces with our customers and partners to find solutions to reduce the uncertainty caused by the long transit times at borders.
We now offer you the possibility to use real-time data of the start-up Sixfold GmbH on our cloud Solution PTV xServer internet. This gives you an overview of all relevant border crossing times for trucks in real time and allows you to use them for visualization and routing in our PTV xServer. This function helps dispatchers understand the extended transit times for border crossings and even automatically avoid crowded border crossings.
How to use the Feature Layer containing the Sixfold data about transit times at borders?
The Border Transit Times are included in the PTV Traffic Incidents Feature Layer available for the PTV World City Map 2020.2H with API version 2 on PTV xServer internet. On-premise solutions with PTV World City Map 2020.2H and PTV Europe City Map 2020.2H will get the updated PTV Traffic Incidents by end of next week April, 16th 2020.
You can recognize the transit times by the square-icon, these show a truck and a clock placed above it. Transit times are only available on motorways and main roads in Europe with enough recent data to display estimates.
To avoid detours around transit times, non-passable border crossings for >7.49t will be blocked in PTV Traffic Incidents from now on.
For use cases such as strategic planning, you can use PTV Traffic Incidents and a time span of one week. This takes into account the information of the closed border crossings, but ignore the transit times at the borders.
Even the border transit time information and the border blocking information has not a 100% coverage it improves the PTV xServer use cases with PTV Traffic Incidents a lot.
The closed / blocked border information for trucks >7.49t collected by PTV is only available on the marked points shown in this map on the right.
Configuration for cloud solutions:
- Activate the Feature Layer Theme PTV_TrafficIncidents in your PTV xMap and PTV xRoute service request.
- To calculate a route with the border transit times in PTV xRoute service you need to set additionally the time consideration and plan your route.
- It is also possible to deactivate / activate the transit times and blocked borders separately (default is activated). Therefore you can deactivate / activate the layers in the country specific parameters. The transit times with rule id “ptvTIx_AS_42” and border blockings with rule id “ptvTIx_AS_53”.
- For strategic planning, you can use PTV_TrafficIncidents and a time span of one week. This takes into account the information of the closed border crossings, but ignore the transit times at the borders.
PTV xMap request configuration:
"requestProfile": {
"featureLayerProfile": {
"themes": [
{
"id": "PTV_TrafficIncidents",
"enabled": "true"
}
]
}
}
PTV xRoute request configuration:
{
"storedProfile": "truck40t",
"requestProfile": {
"featureLayerProfile": {
"themes": [
{
"id": "PTV_TrafficIncidents",
"enabled": true,
"countrySpecificParameters": [
{
"id": "*",
"rules": [
{
"id": "ptvTIx_AS_42",
"enabled": true
},
{
"id": "ptvTIx_AS_53",
"enabled": true
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
},
"waypoints": [
{
"$type": "OffRoadWaypoint",
"location": {
"offRoadCoordinate": {
"x": 7.552546425579699,
"y": 47.64452813831258
}
}
},
{
"$type": "OffRoadWaypoint",
"location": {
"offRoadCoordinate": {
"x": 7.78418857855105,
"y": 47.47614532115144
}
}
}
],
"resultFields": {
"polyline": true
},
"routeOptions": {
"timeConsideration": {
"$type": "ExactTimeConsiderationAtStart",
"referenceTime": "2020-04-08T12:01:59+02:00"
}
}
}
Important information about quality and availability
This started as an impromptu project at Sixfold because they “want to do good”. Sixfold have refrained for now to put a license on the data, because they want to focus their efforts on helping and not commercializing this.
Therefore the use of the data in our PTV Traffic Incidents is for free. Sixfold and we at PTV did develop this at a pretty rapid pace, therefore please do not expect 100% uptime, reliability, stability etc.
However, the border transit time information and the border blocking information has not a 100% coverage, we decided to integrate the Sixfold data because it best reflects the current situation.
If you need further information or support please contact the PTV xServer Support Team.
