Where every trailer is: Wheere positioning, live in YARDtwin

A yard map is only as honest as its positions. Gate check-ins, dock calls and jockey tasks tell you where a trailer should be; a positioning system tells you where it is. This short film puts the two together: Wheere radio trackers on the trailers, their fixes arriving in YARDtwin's live Wheere connector, and the yard map, the gate and the record all working from one measured position.

How a fix gets in

Wheere works out each tracker's position by radio and pushes every fix to YARDtwin as a signed message: an HMAC over the body, and an event id that stops replays. YARDtwin checks the signature, looks the tracker up in the site's tag registry to find its trailer, and matches the trailer to today's open booking, or to a parked trailer when there is none. From then on the booking, the yard map and the gate share one position.

Inbound: arrived, checked in and released by the trailer

An inbound delivery for a carrier, booked to door three. With automatic arrival switched on for the site, the moment the tracker crosses the site boundary the booking is arrived and checked in, with the time and the distance recorded and nobody at the gatehouse typing. The marker then follows the trailer down the yard road to its door, and the trailer's own details show its coordinates, its source and the track it took.

Once it is unloaded, the gate works through the departure checklist and clears it. The truck leaves, and YARDtwin records the departure the moment the trailer is clear of the fence.

The shunter: one move, one tap

A dropped trailer needs to be at door six. The move lands on the shunter's phone; as the trailer is pulled across the yard the map shows every metre and keeps the route. One tap confirms the move, and the yard record matches the yard.

Outbound: loaded, sealed, cleared, gone

An outbound live load runs the same way in reverse: checked in on arrival, backed onto its door, loaded and sealed at the dock, and when the gate clears it the tracker carries it out and closes the visit.

What the record shows

Every arrival, move and departure is on the audit log with the positioning system as the actor, next to the gate officer's checklist and the warehouse's own entries. The track is kept for every visit.

What a site needs

• A Wheere deployment on the trailers you want to see, with the trackers mapped to trailer numbers in Site Admin.
• A georeferenced yard layout. Two surveyed points in the Layout Builder put the map on real ground.
• Three per-site switches. Tracker positions, automatic arrival and automatic departure, each off by default.
• Nothing new on the YARDtwin side. The connector, the map view and the geofence are part of the product.

Wheere is a YARDtwin technology partner, and the film was made on a demo yard. If your site runs Wheere, or you are weighing up positioning for a yard, we would like to show you this on your own layout.