Data-driven insights into truck utilisation challenges in freight logistics

Increasing costs and Green Deal requirements are forcing the transport industry to better utilize available resources. In addition to these major challenges, millions of kilometres are driven by trucks with unused capacity globally. The focus of this paper is to better understand the complex dependencies of truck capacity utilisation behaviour. To this end, a software platform was created to analyze different scenarios for capacity utilisation using a real dataset from a leading European logistics company. The analysis revealed the cause-and-effect relationships that influence truck utilisation and underscored the importance of cargo volume and weight data to improve utilisation. Future research will focus on developing technologies to detect cargo weight and volume, providing essential input for predictive models aimed at identifying low-utilisation patterns in advance.