CCJ Innovators profiles carriers and fleets that have found innovative ways to overcome trucking’s challenges. If you know a carrier that has displayed innovation, contact CCJ Chief Editor Jason Cannon at [email protected] or 800-633-5953.
Much of the focus today on artificial intelligence in trucking has been on driver safety and back office efficiencies, but AI opportunities lie where many of trucking's inefficiencies begin: the check-in.
A driver pulls on to a lot, shuffles through various paperwork and hands it over to a guard, who then has to verify it, confirm the driver is on-time, and then check in with the warehouse to find out where the driver is supposed to go nest. That's a minimum of seven steps and one hiccup along the way is minutes, if not hours, of delay.
RXO has deployed AI-powered check-in system for trucks arriving at warehouses and distribution centers. The visual AI technology, which was introduced at RXO’s cross-border facility, identifies trucks via video and extracts image and video data to streamline the check-in and security process and is integrated with RXO’s Yard Management System to automate appointment matching.
"It solved two types of problems," said RXO Chief Information Officer Yoav Amiel. "One is for the carriers overall, there are bottlenecks at the gate, so the inefficiencies, that when they are at the gate and they need to wait for too long. The second thing is around internal productivity and error elimination."
The visual AI technology automates the process of recording trailer numbers and matching appointments when a truck arrives on site, processes previously handled manually, with facility employees documenting truck information and directing carriers to warehouse docks or yard locations. This led to truck backups at the gate during the check-in process due to high traffic, manual documentation and typing errors.
RXO was already using cameras to capturing videos for security purposes in the yard and at the gate. The machine learning layer takes that realtime video feed, identifies the truck information and matches it with the appointment of that driver. To record trailer numbers, the visual AI uses machine learning computer vision and text recognition to process data from a video feed at the gatehouse and extract the data almost instantly. The system then notifies facility staff that a truck has arrived and provides all relevant information.
