Digital Catapult and AF Blakemore trial Logistics Living Lab that could reduce emissions by up to 30 per cent
A new initiative hopes to decarbonise the transport-logistics sector, with the potential to cut CO2e emissions by 15-30 per cent.
Digital Catapult, a deep tech innovation organisation, this week announced the results of a pilot programme it delivered to address the environmental impact of empty trucks on roads across the country.
UK logistics play a critical role in driving economic growth, but freight accounts for 31 per cent of all UK transport CO2 emissions, and statistics from the Department for Transport (DfT) show that 30 per cent of trucks on UK roads are running with empty loads.
The sector is under pressure to decarbonise without compromising on efficiency, and the pilot programme set out to prove that deep tech can achieve this.
The pilot scheme was delivered by Digital Catapult in partnership with AF Blakemore & Son, the company behind SPAR convenience stores, to explore how a shared digital infrastructure could establish more intelligent vehicle slot filling, routing, and tracking.
Scaling of the solution would allow competing logistics providers to safely share information on available truck space across their collective fleets, without the need for a single party to have full control or visibility of the entire system.
Real-world trial
The solution was trialled in a real-world industrial environment, and saw distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the internet of things (IoT) combined with an algorithm developed by project partner Fuuse, to optimise route planning and truck use.
It achieved this by matching vehicle transport capacity with shipment needs across multiple UK organisations, and saw a 37 per cent decrease in overall transport costs and a 9 per cent improvement in vehicle fill rate for food retail and wholesale distributor AF Blakemore & Son.
The project, titled the Logistics Living Lab, is a UKRI-backed project, led by Digital Catapult and delivered as part of the Made Smarter Innovation | Digital Supply Chain Hub, which has so far helped over 40 startups and SMEs to secure more than £3 million in funding.
Tim Lawrence, director of the Digital Supply Chain Hub at Digital Catapult, said: - “When we launched the Made Smarter Innovation Digital Supply Chain Hub three years ago, we knew the potential of deep technologies for UK supply chains, but as we begin to see the results of the flagship projects like the Logistics Living Lab, we can start to realise potential into impact.
”The solutions built through this unique industry collaboration deliver a triple benefit to the UK logistics sector by empowering the organisations that make up our complex supply chains, to become more efficient, reduce costs to improve their bottom line and make a lasting environmental difference to positively contribute to the future of the planet.”
The project’s activities and outcomes are now detailed in a newly published report, accessible through the Digital Supply Chain Hub. Digital Catapult and its partners plan to scale this solution to further decarbonise the UK logistics sector.
