Drivers' Working Hours

The drivers' working hours are a set of regulations that define break periods and driving/travel time limits for vehicle drivers. The purpose of a driving time regulation law is to improve road safety and ensure good working conditions of drivers.

If no driver object with a working hours preset is passed with the request, working hours will be unlimited.

Which restrictions apply

There may not be just a single regulation but many regulations that the driver has to abide by. For instance, one regulation may deal with working hours for all workers, and another regulation may deal with working hours for drivers of heavy vehicles only. Since drivers of heavy vehicles are also workers, both regulations apply to them.

We distinguish three types of times to which a restriction may apply.

• Driving time: includes the time behind the wheel, time on combined transports are not included.
• Working time: includes driving time, service time unless used for recreation, and waiting time if lower than working time threshold.
• Travel time: the entire time also including, break, waiting time, and the daily rest.

Scheduling breaks and rests

Usually, breaks and rests are scheduled when the driver is required to take a break or a rest. Opening intervals of waypoints are taken into account so that breaks may be scheduled at other points in time in order not to miss an opening interval.

Both service times and times on combined transports can be used for recreation when enabling the corresponding parameters useServiceTimeForRecreation and useTimeOnCombinedTransportForRecreation. In that case breaks and rests will be scheduled during service or when on a combined transport, remaining times will be marked as waiting times. See the Waypoints concept for additional information.

Already conducted work of the driver

A driver might already have some accumulated driving/working hours before the start of the route. In this case, the information on already conducted work is provided by the Work Logbook. These values will be taken into account when scheduling breaks and daily rests according to the break and daily rest rules. The conducted work of the driver might be reset if driver had time to rest before start of the route. In other words, if the difference of the start time of the route and the lastTimeTheDriverWorked is more than the given daily rest time.

Naturally, accumulated working and travel time are greater than or equal to the corresponding accumulated driving time. In the same way, the driving time since the last daily rest is always greater than or equal to the corresponding accumulated time since the last break. Therefore for example, if accumulatedDrivingTimeSinceLastBreak is given but not the accumulatedDrivingTimeSinceLastDailyRest the latter is assumed to be equal to the former.

"workLogbook":{
    "lastTimeTheDriverWorked": "2020-01-31T20:00:00",
    "accumulatedDrivingTimeSinceLastBreak": 14400,
    "accumulatedDrivingTimeSinceLastDailyRest": 27000
}

Available presets

For single day presets no schedule events of type DAILY_REST will be returned. Only VIOLATION_EVENTS will be returned when the maximum working time or maximum driving time is exceeded.

Try it in the Drivers Working Hours code sample.