Project to cut road emissions by reducing empty trucks

Digital Catapult has unveiled details of its new project, the Logistics Living Lab, which aims to cut the carbon emissions of empty and near-empty delivery trucks on the road.

The project comes as road freight transportation and removal services produced 11.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020, threatening the progress in the UK to reach net zero by 2050.

Freight accounts for 31% of all UK transport CO2 emissions, and these emissions are the main driver of climate related risks including climate change and extreme weather. This is where the Logistics Living Lab will make a difference, by leveraging emerging technologies including distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the internet of things (IoT) to reduce the number of empty trucks releasing pollutants into the atmosphere on roads across the country.  

The Logistics Living Lab will see the development of a shared digital infrastructure for more intelligent management of vehicle slot filling, routing, and tracking to allow competing logistics providers to safely share information available truck space across their collective fleets, without the need for a single party needing full control or visibility of the whole system.

The infrastructure, underpinned by DLT, aims to deliver greater coordination across the logistics sector without compromises to commercial sensitivity and security of data, while enabling greater operational efficiency.

The project brings together five leading digital innovators including Vodafone Digital Asset Broker, Microsoft, Yusen Logistics, Fuuse, and Parity Technologies. Digital Catapult are leading the consortium of companies, with a shared goal of reducing emissions and increasing capacity utilisation, as it looks to encourage broader adoption of sustainable innovation in business and industry. The project will run until September 2024.

The Logistics Living Lab project is part of Digital Catapult’s Made Smarter Innovation Digital Supply Chain Hub which aims to make supply chains more efficient, resilient and sustainable by developing and promoting the adoption of advanced digital technologies in supply chains across the UK. It comes as a more practical approach to solving UK manufacturing and logistics challenges is needed, including the reduction of road congestion, improvement of customer experience, and bringing the UK closer to its net zero ambitions.