01_holcim_maqer challenge

Inspiration

In today's landscape, a striking 92% of heavy trucks return empty, a glaring inefficiency that not only drains resources but also contributes significantly to environmental harm, particularly in terms of CO2 emissions.

Our goal is to reduce CO2 emissions and save money in the process

What it does

Our innovative AI-driven solution is set to reimagine the transportation conundrum without the need for a full-scale revolution. We tackle the issue head-on by focusing on optimizing empty truck travel time.

Our approach is simple yet effective: Users input their routes into our platform, and we employ AI algorithms to intelligently match and optimize these journeys. Instead of needlessly duplicating routes, we identify opportunities for trucks to share trips, minimizing the distance they travel with no cargo onboard.

How we built it

When we chose the challenge we dived into the problem to understand the need and the objective to come up with the most fitting solution. We chose a platform that can fit any delivery company such that we can come up with a general solution.

Everyone used their expertise to solve the different challenges. We chose to use an SQL database for easy lookup at runtime. Google Maps API was used to lookup distances between points. We built a web interface in Python to conveniently add routes as well as visualize them on a map such that users can easily see the optimization impact.

In the heart of our solution lies an algorithm that groups trips together such that it's more economical to drive them with a single truck rather than with two or more trucks.

Challenges we ran into

Creating complex queries against the SQL database was tricky since they had to take into account many parameters important to the customer, such as the time and place of delivery. Lack of sleep was of course a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are able to deliver a first prototype to tackle a challenge that is not at all obvious for a multimillion dollar company! And, we did it in a day and a half. The consequences of having such a tool in day-to-day use are really exciting, both financially but mostly about the positive impact it has on planet earth. We hope that our platform will be adopted by many to allow a more sustainable planet.

We are a women first team, having 2 women. We are also a family group consisting of 3 siblings and 2 friends.

What we learned

Apparently, construction materials are not as simple as they look at first glance! The complications of having different materials, as well as different ways to transport them doesn't ease up the transportation problem. Therefore, we aim towards sharing transportation among different companies, not necessarily from the construction industry. Furthermore, we learned to manage a really short-timed project, by focusing on the key aspects of our platform development, and by bringing the expertise of each of the participants into play.