Automated logistics services

To create conditions for sustainable urban and regional development there needs to be efficient transportation to, from and within cities and regions. In order to increase efficiency in freight transport it requires better planning and technology to manage physical transport, information and monitoring of compliance.

By looking into different cases related to the handling of goods, collection of data and connection of goods, load carriers and vehicles, this pre-study aimed to identify specific areas where efficiency could be improved by automation and also what other benefits automation can provide.

The project addressed the following:

Identify specific cases in supply chains consisting of services, processes, flows and nodes that has the potential to increase efficiency and are especially interesting from the perspective of automation as well as for future demonstration projects
What kind of enabling technologies are available? Such as automated freight/vehicle tracking & control, automated handling and transport (such as driving, loading/unloading and storage) and automated data collection
What collaborative arrangements must be established to enable automated logistics services?

Results

The objective of this pre-study was to identify a number of cases for which automation gives opportunities for raising effectiveness, and there are actors prepared to run innovation projects to benefit from these opportunities. Some ten ideas of such projects have been identified with stakeholder estimations of potential, needs for new technologies, and necessary actor constellations, and proposals to following steps. One of these has already been applied for to Drive Sweden.

The objective has also been to survey state of the art as well as ongoing and finished projects in this domain. To accomplish that a new structuring of automated logistics services from an operational point of view has been developed in which the different logistics processes have been coupled for a number of strategic logistics areas. The result of the identification indicates at large that there is a lack of automation efforts in a number of areas with a large potential, which partly may depend on the difficulties in organizing all the actors needed for obtaining results.