Pau Riera Comalada
UPS and how software and ingenuity can change our theories
Vehicle routing
has been an important topic in logistics. As vehicle routing, we understand to
find the efficient route between different sets of points. We can think that
this can only be an important topic in firms that based their businesses in
driving large times on roads, but this is not true, because all firms must have
some vehicles carrying the raw materials that they need to finish their
products.
George Dantzig,
in 1959, found the way to make routes efficiently with linear programming.
These studies are still important in our days, but some firms have found some
situations in which they can improve Dantzig’s studies. And here we find the
relationship with UPS.
UPS is not
always driving along the shortest possible route. What they do is not turning left,
and this is for a simple reason: they save more fuel. To explain this, it’s
important to talk about big cities, like for example Paris. For turning left in
this type of cities, you must go through different lanes and this usually
implies waiting, and waiting implies wasting more fuel than if you do more
kilometres without waiting.
To do
this, UPS is using a software called “Orion”, what in words of UPS “it’s a
software that works more like a driver than as a computer”.
As
a result, the company claims it uses 10m gallons less fuel, emits 20,000 tonnes
less carbon dioxide (what it is equivalent to remove 5,300
cars of the road per year) and delivers 350,000 more packages every year
Not only for
this reason we can put UPS as an example of a good firm in logistics. Another
reason is the fact that avoid ing turning left, UPS has decreased the number of
accidents that their employees have.
And,
this discipline can be applied by the population. A study of the US National Highway Traffic Safety
Association demonstrated that about 61% of the crashes occurred when we turn,
or we cross an intersection that involve turn left. On the other hand, just
3.1% involved to turn right. For this reason, will be important to think a
little bit what we will do the next time we want to turn left.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/16/world/ups-trucks-no-left-turns/index.html
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