Adaptive Ocean Visibility

Overview

Ocean shipments spend most of their transit time at sea, where cellular connectivity is unavailable and every device transmission attempt draws down battery that has to last the whole voyage. But the first and last legs of an ocean shipment - the road haul to the origin port, and the road haul from the port of discharge to the final destination - are exactly when shippers want the most frequent visibility, since that's when cargo changes hands, sits in yards, and is most exposed to risk.

Adaptive Ocean Visibility automatically adjusts how often your tracker measures and transmits data as a shipment moves between road and ocean legs, so you get frequent updates where they matter most and extended battery life during the ocean crossing - without any manual device reconfiguration.

The module includes two workflows that work together across a shipment's lifecycle:

Both workflows apply to shipments automatically once the module is enabled - no per-shipment setup is required.

Availability

The Adaptive Ocean Visibility is available as a Workflow Module to Premium Tier customers. It can be enabled from the Automations home page.

How First Mile Visibility works

When a shipment starts, the workflow:

1. Waits for an initial battery reading from the device (up to 24 hours) before making any decisions.
2. Checks whether the shipment's active leg is already an ocean leg. If so, the device is switched straight to ocean-mode intervals - no need to wait on the checks below.
3. Otherwise, it checks the tracker's estimated battery usage for the trip:
• If the device is projected to use 95% or more of its battery before the shipment completes, it's switched to ocean-mode intervals immediately, to conserve power for the crossing.
• If projected battery usage is healthy (under 95%), it continuously monitors the tracker's proximity to the expected departure seaport:
• Within 25 km of a seaport, or no seaport match found for the shipment's route → switch to ocean-mode intervals (assume the ocean leg is starting or the route can't be determined, so favor battery conservation).
• Further than 25 km from a seaport → keep the device on road-mode intervals, and re-check periodically until the tracker is within range of a seaport, predicted battery usage exceeds 95%, or the shipment's active leg changes to an ocean leg - whichever happens first. When any of those trigger, the device switches to ocean-mode intervals.

How Final Mile Visibility works

When the shipment's device is reported as having arrived at the port of discharge:

1. The tracker is immediately switched to road-mode intervals for the final delivery leg.
2. The workflow then watches estimated battery usage for up to 60 days. If predicted usage climbs to 95% or higher before the shipment completes, the device is reverted to ocean-mode intervals to avoid running the battery out before the shipment is picked up as complete.

Both workflows stop watching a shipment as soon as it's marked complete.

Configurable intervals

Each workflow exposes the same set of tunable parameters (defaults shown):

Because ocean-mode transmissions are far less frequent than road-mode ones, expect noticeably sparser location and condition updates while a shipment is at sea - this is expected behavior and is what extends tracker battery life for the voyage.

Best Practices

When planning usage, it is important to consider the following:

• This feature operates only on identified ocean shipments. It will not make any configuration changes, under any circumstances, on shipments with only road or air legs.
• Increased First-Mile visibility occurs only if the shipment has a defined road leg, before the ocean leg. If only an ocean leg is defined, or only an ocean leg followed by a road leg, the device will immediately be switched to ocean mode.
• Success of the switch to ocean mode depends on having a reasonably accurate shipment definition. If the first road leg endpoint is set to an incorrect seaport, the tracker likely won’t ever come close enough to switch over to ocean mode.

Frequently asked questions

• What qualifies as an ocean shipment?
  Any shipment with an ocean leg configured.

• What if my tracker's battery is running low before the shipment finishes?
  Both workflows treat battery health as a priority signal. If projected usage crosses 95%, the tracker is switched to (or kept in) ocean-mode's lower-frequency intervals to stretch remaining battery, even if the shipment is technically still on a road leg.

• Does this require me to configure anything per shipment?
  No. Once the module is enabled on your account, both workflows apply automatically to your ocean shipments. Use the shipment targeting condition only if you want to scope the behavior to a subset of shipments.

• What counts as "near a seaport"?
  The workflow checks whether the tracker's current location is within 25 km of a known seaport matched to the shipment's ocean leg. If the ocean leg does not fall precisely within a Tive-Provided seaport, we will expand to search for nearby seaports.