Plan raises efficiency of freight distribution

Researchers at NUI Galway are developing software which could significantly cut the amount of time lorries spend on European roads with less than full cargoes.

According to researchers at the university's department of information technology, a surprising 38 per cent of all lorry journeys in the Republic take place without any cargo due to trucks returning from jobs empty and poor logistics planning.

Added to that, average lorry-loads are about 60 per cent, a figure which is maintained through the EU and the US. This under-utilisation contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr Michael Madden at NUIG says his team is about one year to 18 months away from developing a prototype "virtual broker" which would be connected to global satellite positioning systems fitted in lorries.

Details of distribution requirements, for example 10 tonnes of freight which needed to be moved across Italy, would be on line and the haulier company's virtual brokerage software would figure out how much it would cost to divert a lorry for the freight, pick it up and deliver it.

While the idea is simple enough, Dr Madden told The Irish Times that under-utilisation led to massive waste and pollution. "Where one tonne of freight is moved one kilometre it is recorded as one tonne-kilometre. In the EU we currently have more than one billion tonne-kilometre movements each year," he explained.

"Even a 10 per cent increase in capacity would mean a reduction of about 100 million tonne-kilometre journeys and significant reductions in costs and in carbon dioxide emissions."

The software to handle will be known as Virtual Logistics Multi-Agent Broker, or V-Lab. It will put buyer and seller together and allow each to calculate the costs of a deal through a number of diverse factors.

The V-Labs could be in production commercially in about three years. Enterprise Ireland gave €500,000 funding to the project.