The UK government has announced 7 million GBP in funding to help decarbonise and increase the efficiency of freight transportation through the rollout of emerging technologies.
The funding will be used to develop and scale solutions to improve air quality, reduce traffic, create jobs and allow people to get their goods more quickly.
These solutions will focus on making it easier to move freight from one mode of transport to another, and thus improving journey times and reliability.
Roads Minister Richard Holden said:Our freight industry is vital to underpinning the economy and keeps Britain moving, so it is crucial we invest in new innovations to make it greener and quicker.
This fund will accelerate new ideas and technologies, helping to develop a future pipeline of innovations that can be rolled out to create jobs and allow everyone to get their goods faster and easier.
The freight innovation fund (FIF) will go to 36 small and medium-sized enterprises to test their ideas to enable greater efficiency and bring about decrease in emissions across the freight industry.
In particular, the fund aims to address three long-standing issues in the freight sector:
- A lack of cross-industry data sharing between different modes of freight transport
- Difficulties in intermodal transport, such as between rail and road
- Inefficiencies in freight distribution in ports for different transport modes
These aims will build on previous government initiatives to support increased research and development in the freight industry.
Technologies supported by past funding include:
- Hypermile’s artificial intelligence programme that offers real-time feedback to help heavy-goods vehicle drivers save fuel
- Fishbone Solutions’s use of vibrational data from rail freight wagons and artificial intelligence analysis to determine whether the wagons are working correctly
- CGA Simulation’s tool to simulate urban environments and predict the best place for infrastructure to enable developments in logistics
