Trucking operators may soon turn to a computer program to send drayage trucks to and from port terminals and elsewhere.
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about automated container terminals, as well as the possibility of self-steering containerships and commercial trucks, but one company is preparing to automate another, less visible element of the supply chain: truck dispatching.
Imagine if instead of relying on human beings to send drayage trucks to and from port terminals and elsewhere, trucking and logistics companies instead relied on a computer program that is faster and more efficient than any person ever could be to handle the job.
ProfitToolsInc., a provider of transportation management software to intermodal trucking companies, is working to make such a prospect a reality, and full implementation isn’t expected in a few years, or even several months, but in just a handful of weeks.
Computing Considerations. After years of work, New Hampshire-based Profit Tools says it has nearly perfected a first-of-its-kind intermodal drayage optimization solution called Profit Tools Optimization. The program will allow trucking companies to rely on artificial intelligence to automatically manage their intermodal trucking operations, rather than having those functions handled by a human being.
Profit Tools Optimization, which made its public debut during the Intermodal Association of North America’s (IANA) annual conference in Long Beach, Calif., this past September, can automatically plan the best dispatch assignments for efficiency and on-time performance. According to its designers, the program is smart enough to evaluate and recommend the optimal plan for hundreds of containers every second and could potentially increase a carrier’s truck-to-dispatcher ratio by 200 percent.
The artificial intelligence built into the system also provides real-time automated dispatching, optimized planning, and impact analysis of operational changes before they are put into effect, according to Profit Tools President and co-founder Brian Widell.
“There’s a lot that goes into that. It needs to be aware of all the concerns and considerations a dispatcher would normally be concerned about—everything from scheduling deadlines to equipment compatibilities and pickup and return locations of that equipment, driver preferences and qualifications,” Widell explained in an interview at the 2017 IANA Intermodal Expo. “And it takes all that information, runs it through an artificial intelligence engine, and can produce the best plan for most efficient and on time performance using those inputs. And it can do it quickly enough that the plan is not static; it can reoptimize in real time.”
“It’s an efficiency machine that’s not available in the drayage industry, anywhere,” Profit Tools Engineer Louis Rochette said of the software. “And optimization isn’t a new concept. It’s something that Uber uses. If you’ve ever gone on a plane and it reroutes you to a different terminal, that’s optimization. UPS uses it. So it’s something that’s out there and very successful, and we’re just bringing it to the intermodal industry because we have the intermodal expertise.
“The reason it took so long to get [to the intermodal industry] is there is a high barrier to entry,” Rochette told American Shipper. “If you took a pen and paper and said, ‘Okay, give me an optimization engine that tells you everything about the intermodal industry,’ to get it to understand what a chassis is, get it to understand that you have different locations that you can use to bring back certain chassis at times, to feed in the different preferences and requirements that you need—all that from pen and paper—if you hired a development team to do it, would be an astronomical number.
“We did the heavy lifting for you,” he said. “We took our logic and our knowledge of the intermodal industry, and populated it so that we fit in all the rules.”
The actual optimization engine doesn’t require a supercomputer. It can run on ordinary computing hardware, as you would have in a typical operations or cloud environment.
“We built the solution to be a hosted platform, so in most cases, unless somebody specifically wants to bring the infrastructure locally, they actually won’t have to concern themselves with the hardware it needs to run on,” Widell said. “They just need to connect their systems to it and we’ll take it from there.”
Proof Of Concept. Profit Tools has been building the automated dispatcher program out for the better part of the past three years, Widell said, and it’s now in production use, albeit in phases.
“The first phase enables companies to work with the tool using their own data, so that they can see the plan the optimizer would build and then configure their business requirements, their driver fleet, their operating rules, their preferences, in the system until the plan that it’s producing is actually a plan they could execute,” he explained.
“From there, once the optimizer is producing a plan that they think can work for them, the next phase is what we call ‘proof of concept,’ where we actually let the plan play out in real time over the course of a day, so you can see how it responds to traffic disruptions, or a driver getting held up with a customer. The system will be dynamic and responsive to that,” said Widell.
“Once people have seen those two stages, we move on to what we call ‘blueprint,’ where we map out how many other terminals we’re dealing with, what your implementation specifically needs to consist of to get this live in your operation. And then the ‘implementation’ phase will follow through and do that,” he said. “So it’s a four-step process. We’re at the beginning steps with people now and we expect that the first actual live automated dispatches on the system will be in the first half of 2018.”
One of the companies participating in the automation trial is Dependable Highway Express, a Los Angeles-based full-service logistics provider. Shane Van Der Waag, the company’s intermodal services director, told American Shipper his company had worked with Profit Tools for about five years, and that it was more than willing when approached about participating in the trial.
“They came to us about a month ago (in August) and said that they wanted us, because we’ve been a partner with them for so long. And then their product is so awesome to work with,” Van Der Waag said.
“It’s an awesome system,” he said. “Everything’s gone without a hitch so far. We’re just down to the nitty gritty of the last little nuances, but it does the proper planning. It puts everything in line; it turns green when [the trucks are] on time; it turns red when they’re going to be late or reassigned; it tells you if you have too much work for your staff for that day and where to reassign it. All the little things that need to happen are going along just fine.”
Expected ROI. According to Profit Tools, implementers of the technology can expect to see a return on investment in one to four months. Van Der Waag said his company’s ROI is expected to be about 3 percent.
“It’s huge,” he said of the benefits of the technology for Dependable Highway Express. “You’re talking $180,000 a year just in dispatch savings. And it’s hard to put a number on the productivity of the driver, but I know it’ll make the drivers more productive too, because there won’t be any wrong dispatches where they’re backtracking, going to the wrong place. It’ll all be planned out.
“It’ll tighten up the drivers’ schedule to optimize the best drivers at the right times,” Van Der Waag added. “It’s going to reduce our costs of dispatch and it’s going to optimize our drivers’ day. You won’t have to rely on if your dispatcher’s making the correct move, if they’re making the correct dispatch. It does it all for you, so it takes human error out of it. And instead of having six dispatchers, we’ll have three basically, and then all they will do is adjust the system slightly, like when empties get shut out or a terminal stops taking empties at noon and they were taking them earlier.
That’s all they have to do: little adjustments that the computer won’t know because we (humans) know about the customer.”
Van Der Waag also said that the technology will be of great assistance to his company because at the nearby monolithic Port of Los Angeles, everything is so dynamic that it can be difficult for humans to keep track of the changes.
“If you pull an empty [container] from one terminal, it goes back to a different terminal,” he said. “Everybody’s on their own appointment system—nobody’s on the same—so you have to go to so many different websites to look at these appointments, to make appointments. All those things that take a lot of time, the system is going to help eliminate.
“It’s a great system. I hope none of my competitors use it,” he said jokingly.
Widell explained that the optimization technology was developed with the goal of bringing something that’s preconfigured to understand and can handle the business requirements of an intermodal drayage carrier and allow the carrier to configure their particular settings, rather than having to build up their own configurations.
“Compared to other optimization systems out there where you would start completely from scratch and need to describe everything about intermodal to them and spend a large sum of money building that up, with us, we already know about intermodal. We just need to map the particular requirements of your business,” he said.
The optimization tool is expected to save companies potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but how much will it cost to run?
“Cost is going to be based on how big your company is, how many trucks you run, how many operations you’re going to need this for, how many end locations you have, so the cost will vary,” Rochette said.
“Most companies, if they’re operating something like up to five or six terminals, whether they are a current Profit Tools customer or not, they should expect a total implementation cost of under $100,000,” Widell said. “And if they’re a Profit Tools customer, the communications are already built, so it can be considerably less than that.”
The structure of the ongoing post-implementation cost is a simple subscription-based model at $79.99 a month per truck, he added.
“This is the future,” Rochette said. “Us as a country and as a world, we’re moving towards automation and advances in technology, and I think that this is a great first step.”
