Online food delivery service Ocado is using route calculation software to maximise the payload and efficiency of its delivery vans.
Ocado, which has seen rapid growth in the three years since it was started, delivers groceries to consumers from one of two warehouses, with a third set to be constructed on the south coast of the country.
Speaking at today’s Clean Energy Summit, the company’s head of corporate responsibility Suzanne Westlake said that as a result, Ocado had identified its energy efficiency challenges as being more in kind with the likes of DHL and Amazon rather than traditional supermarkets.
But due to the lengthy timeframes of its delivery routes – drivers often complete 350-mile drives spanning seven or eight hours at time – trials with electric or hybrid vehicles had proved unsuccessful.
“We’ve tried lots of different [things] but we’ve found we struggle with anything other than conventional vehicles,” she said.
Instead the company has designed software which has been designed to calculate the most efficient way of conducting all of the deliveries the retailer has registered for that day, taking into account proximity between different deliveries and the time they have been requested.
The software is capable of calculating more than 3,000 routes per second, and is used alongside a ‘Green Van’ system wherein customers can check to see if another delivery is scheduled for nearby before specifying their chosen delivery time.
