Yandex Market has reduced the emissions of its delivery service

2022: Reduced delivery service emissions

On August 6, 2022, Yandex Market announced that it had reduced the emissions of its delivery service by almost 5,000 tons of CO2 equivalent in a year thanks to the planning of courier routes using artificial intelligence technology from Yandex Routing. A forest area comparable in area to Bitsevsky Park, the second largest park in Moscow, can absorb such a volume of greenhouse gases in a year.

How to optimize routes Yandex Routing automates the planning of transport resources and offers optimal routes for drivers, allowing more orders to be delivered by fewer vehicles. The procedure for passing points by couriers is determined by the algorithm taking into account historical data on traffic jams at different times of the day on different sections of roads. Routing also takes into account the work schedule of warehouses, the promise to the recipient by delivery time, customer service time and other operational features of a particular company - more than 300 different parameters in total. This ensures an accurate forecast of the time of arrival at each of the points, reduction of mileage and downtime. As a result of such route optimization, large companies manage to reduce fleet mileage by an average of 18.8%. In the case of Yandex Market, over 12 months this made it possible to reduce emissions by 4,975 tons of CO2 equivalent (a conventional unit that is used to estimate the volume of greenhouse gases).

What does it mean

• About so many greenhouse gases will not enter the atmosphere if a thousand cars cars with a gasoline engine disappear from the roads for a whole year.
• On average, so many gases are generated during the production of electricity sufficient to charge 605 million smartphones.
• To absorb such a volume of greenhouse gases in a year, a forest of 23 square kilometers will be required - this is slightly more than the area of ​ ​ Bitsevsky Park, the second largest in Moscow.

How Emissions Reduction Was Thought The amount of emissions saved is the difference between the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from mileage in the Routing non-use scenario and the amount of emissions from actual mileage. The scenario value was obtained by multiplying the actual value by the Routing efficiency factor, which was derived on the basis of mileage reduction indicators for service customers with logistics tasks similar to the Market. The actual value is calculated on the basis of the total fuel consumption data, where fuel consumption is the sum of the products of vehicle runs and the values ​ ​ of the average fuel consumption per kilometer of run.

Calculation details

• For the year from April 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022, Market's partner couriers on low-tonnage trucks and vans (mainly with economical diesel engines) drove just over 64 million km. On cars (mainly using gasoline) - more than 40 million km.
• The fuel consumption of cars used by couriers-partners of the Market was estimated taking into account the characteristics declared by their manufacturers. On average, the consumption was about 8 liters of gasoline for cars and 8 liters of diesel fuel for trucks for every 100 km of track (the additional consumption from traffic with cargo and idle was not taken into account as insignificant).
• Mileage savings were estimated according to data on transport trips of large Routing client companies from logistics, retail and e-commerce, delivering food and non-food products of various categories (everyday demand, fashion, DIY, etc.) to both customers and warehouses, darkstores, stores, PVZ. As a result of the use of Routing, the mileage of the fleet of such companies is reduced by an average of 18.8% compared to "manual" route planning.
• Based on the average reduction in mileage, gasoline savings in Market cars amounted to 747,486 liters, diesel fuel - 1,185,766 liters.
• Emissions were estimated in accordance with the international guidelines for mobile emissions sources - the GHG Protocol and the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The amount of fuel saved was multiplied by the emission factors from the combustion of different types of fuel, as well as by the global warming potential (GWP) of the estimated types of greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxide. The potential for global warming is the coefficient that determines the extent of their impact on global warming. It converts their emissions into CO2 equivalent amounts. As a result, a total reduction in CO2-equivalent emissions was obtained: 4,975 tons. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proposed the use of emission factors for these particular gases, and today they are traditionally used for such calculations. In the heat of combustion of fuel, they were guided by IPCC technical manuals and GOST coefficients.
• Examples to illustrate the scale of emissions reduction were selected using a calculator on the official website of the Environmental Protection Agency. USA

Yandex Routing is working to create an emission saving calculator for customers, and also plans to calculate the environmental effect of the introduction of Routing within the framework of existing partnerships.