Drivers' Working Hours

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

To restrict the drivers' working hours via the API, you must specify the rules for the driver. If the driver object does not contain a working hours field, 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 time span to which a restriction may apply.

• Driving time: includes the time behind the wheel.
• Working time: includes driving time, service time at depot and customers, and idle time if lower than working time threshold.
• Travel time: the entire time also including, break and idle time.

What are Break rules

Working hours provisions impose limits on driving, working and travel times and enforce breaks after a certain time of each type is accumulated. But there is not just one type of break. the relevant rules are firstly a mandatory break, typically of 30-45 minutes, after certain driving and/or working time. And secondly, total allowed driving and/or working time.

The allowed driving/working time between two breaks can be configured, as well as the minimum duration that would qualify as a break. The API also offers preset values for all relevant fields based on European and American official regulations. Only one preset value is allowed, but the values given by a preset can be overwritten by providing more restrictive values in the corresponding fields.

Example of a set of rules:

"breakRule": {
    "breakTime": 2700,
    "maximumDrivingTimeBetweenBreaks": 16200
},
"maximumDrivingTime": 32400,
"maximumTravelTime": 46800

Which is equivalent to using the preset value EU_DRIVING_TIME_REGULATION:

"workingHoursPreset": "EU_DRIVING_TIME_REGULATION"

In case that both driving time and working time regulation must be considered, the preset field can be used in addition to custom fields to specify both rules. Mind that if the two rules have for example different break times specified only the most restrictive, in this case the longer break time, will be considered and the other value would be ignored. The following example of overwriting a preset shows how to set both driving and working time rules for a single day plan based on EU regulations.

"breakRule": {
    "breakTime": 1800,
    "maximumWorkingTimeBetweenBreaks": 21600,
    "workingTimeThreshold": 900
},
"maximumTravelTime": 32400,
"workingHoursPreset": "EU_DRIVING_TIME_REGULATION"

In this example, break time and maximum travel time are given both by the preset and the custom fields, which represent the working hours regulation. The break time value would then be taken from the preset to be 2700 (45 minutes), and the maximum travel time would be taken from EU working time regulation specified in field "maximumTravelTime" which is 32400 (9.5 hours).

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 for each driver. These values will be taken into account when scheduling breaks according to the break rules. The conducted work of the driver might be reset if the driver had time to make a break before the 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 break time.

Naturally, accumulated working and travel time are greater than or equal to the corresponding accumulated driving time. Therefore, if accumulatedDrivingTimeSinceLastBreak is given but not the accumulatedWorkingTimeSinceLastBreak the latter is assumed to be equal to the former.

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

Scheduled Breaks in the response

Breaks are represented by route events that have the event type BREAK. Note that possible breaks before the start time of the route are not included in the response.

Example of a scheduled break:

"routes":[
    {
        "vehicleId": "Vehicle0",
        "stops":[
            {
            "locationId": "Customer2",
            "tripId": "96bff14b-bd06-4ca2-940c-bbf566f930ff",
            "reportForWayToStop": {
                "distance": 2205,
                "drivingTime": 300,
                "waitingTime": 0,
                "breakTime": 2700,
            },
            "eventsOnWayToStop": [
                {
                    "type": "DRIVING",
                    "startTime": "2016-12-06T10:12:20.0000000+00:00",
                    "duration": 280
                },
                {
                    "type": "BREAK",
                    "startTime": "2016-12-06T10:17:00.0000000+00:00",
                    "duration": 2700
                },
                {
                    "type": "DRIVING",
                    "startTime": "2016-12-06T11:02:00.0000000+00:00",
                    "duration": 20
                }
            ]
            }
        ]
    }
]

Available presets