Ryder, Georgia Tech team up to study impact of autonomous trucking
Summary
The groups sought to understand how to approach autonomy and the potential return on investment and the end result, the believe, is a roadmap to commercialization based on real-world data and a significant cost-savings. The team then introduced optimization models for routing and dispatching and evaluated the proposed autonomous network by comparing it with existing operations under various assumptions. While that particular transportation model guarantees capacity 24/7, it also creates situations where our customers’ trucks haul empty trailers,” says Karen Jones, chief marketing officer and head of new product innovation for Ryder. The researchers’ ATHN and optimization models significantly reduced the number of miles driven with empty trailers, which accounts for a large part of the cost reduction. If you think about ever-escalating consumer demands combined with capacity constraints, driver shortages, and regulatory and safety pressures, autonomous technology is on track to solve a host of industry disruptions,” says Jones.