How AI helped reduce empty lorries leaving Singapore ports by half

SINGAPORE: A Feb 27 (Thursday) article in CNBC reported that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has helped substantially reduce the number of lorries that left Singapore ports empty. The solution provided by AI addressed a number of challenges the industry faced, including high operational costs, wasted trips, and manpower shortages, and increased efficiency in one of the world’s busiest shipping hubs.

The report said that inefficiency was a significant problem in the sector, as more than one-third, or 35 per cent, of lorries that left ports in Singapore were actually empty, which was a waste of fuel and other resources.

However, “using automation and real-time route optimization, empty trips have been nearly halved”, CNBC said.

Collaboration between PSA International, the port operator, and Dutch multinational HERE Technologies has made more than 400 trucks part of the new system. That is almost 20 per cent of the haulage market in the city-state.

Sriram Ramanujam, the vice president for digital products at PSA Southeast Asia, was quoted by CNBC as saying, “OptETruck is a transport management solution, which addresses the trip planning, the trip execution, all the way up to invoicing and billing.”

The firm announced in 2023 that, with the support of Enterprise Singapore, it had developed the cloud-based transport management solution to facilitate smarter trip planning and eliminate operational inefficiencies for the haulier community in Singapore. The solution helps hauliers optimize operating costs, improve asset utilization, and reduce carbon emissions.

OptETruck features automated scheduling, through which it is able to match and recommend jobs so that hauliers may reduce the number of empty trips. It also allows asset pooling, so that hauliers and their partners may share resources and optimize their fleet and trips.

PSA said in 2024 that trucking companies can reduce one empty trip per truck each day by using OptETruck, which means a decrease of 9.6 million kg of carbon emissions every year.

Last year, PSA received a Recognition of Excellence award for OptETruck at the 9th Annual Singapore OpenGov Leadership Forum.

“For complex operations like this, one of the fundamental problems is efficiency. Our shared vision is to provide efficiency, reduce cost or the downtime where there are empty containers or empty trucks,” said Abhijit Sengupta, general manager for Southeast Asia and India at HERE Technologies. /TISG

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