TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATIONS SMART TRUCK
FUEL EFFICIENCY AT ITS BEST The abrupt spike in fuel prices and the dire need to go green has been putting pressure on logistics companies to come up with innovative solutions that are not only fuel efficient, but also ensure reduction in carbon footprint. One such recent innovation is Smart Truck… This is one of the significant innovations for the Indian logistics industry in terms of improving service quality, reducing costs & time as well as CO2 emissions in emerging market conditions. PRERNA SHARMA CRAFTED by DHL Solutions & Innovations (DSI), the Smart Truck is an ‘intelligent’ pickup and delivery vehicle that combines a number of innovative technologies, including a route planner. Piloted by Blue Dart in India, it is designed to provide solutions to urban logistics challenges such as traffic restrictions, density & clogging, while ensuring environmental protection and fulfilling customers’ needs for ontime delivery. These intelligent pick-up and delivery vehicles compute delivery deadlines to calculate the ideal sequence for shipments and use real-time GPS to avoid jams & optimise routings, thereby enabling flexibility and last-minute pickups. This allows the DHL Smart Truck to spend more time on the road to perform its pickup and delivery services. The Smart Truck technology also enables a more efficient sorting process by synchronising the data and physical flow, while real-time communications and visibility of services avoid ‘missed’ pickups
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and delayed deliveries. Together, this provides better customer service and a more cost-effective operation as a result of optimum use of vehicles with less wasted miles. On the company’s GoGreen initiative, Jerry Hsu, CEO, DHL Express Asia Pacific, said, “DHL’s GoGreen programme motivates us to continually address issues that affect the environment and seek innovative solutions to reduce our carbon footprint while providing better services to our customers. In fast-growing, emerging markets, such as India, those needs are critical and will grow as the world continues to urbanise and megacities continue to proliferate. To ease congestion, improve services and reduce pollution, we need solutions that will have a positive impact on the environment, such as the DHL Smart Truck.”
THE CONCEPTUALISATION The Smart Truck solution was developed
Features & functionalities Smart Truck’s innovative technology deals with special areas of interest such as geo data, address data, map data, traffic information and planning constraints. Smart Truck helps in tour optimisation, thereby resulting in: • Reduction of morning throughput time for the operations processes • Increase in productive time on the road • Daily amendment of number of tours depending on actual volumes • Daily calculation of optimal tour cut • Permanent calculation of stop sequence. by DHL Solutions & Innovations (DSI) in Germany, alongside the following partners: German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Aerospace Centre), Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence), Viaboxx, Motorola, Quintiq and Infoware. Talking of customer perception, Dr Keith Ulrich, VP, DHL Solutions & Innovations (DSI), said, “What