Enabling Safe and Sustainable Medical Deliveries by Connected Autonomous Freight Vehicles Operating within Dangerous Goods Regulations

Health service providers in developed nations are responsible for 5% of their national carbon emissions, much of which originate from transport and supply chains. Connected autonomous freight vehicles (CAV-Fs) offer the potential to reduce this impact and enable lower cost operations, with trials being explored across the world. Transportation and carriage regulations, particularly in relation to the movement of dangerous goods (DG) such as medicines and diagnostic specimens, have not been developed for and applied to this new transport mode, particularly where loads are unaccompanied. Through an audit of current legislation and practice, this paper evaluates current DGs regulations applied to the transportation of medical products and medicines by autonomous road vehicles. Where existing regulations are not appropriate for CAV-Fs, recommendations and adaptations have been proposed to support safe and practical application. Remote monitoring and tracking of vehicles are critical for ensuring load security, quick and effective incident response, and management of documents and communications between parties. Loading/unloading procedures are significantly more important than in crewed vehicles, with load segregation and recording of all activity being of key importance. Other recommendations relate to training provision, vehicle specifications, and product health monitoring.</p

Drones: the scope for integration into multi-modal urban logistics services

Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, or drones) are seen as a potential new logistics mode, both for urban areas and beyond, that could reduce service times, energy consumption, tailpipe atmospheric emissions, and numbers of van/truck-based trips, whilst also improving accessibility in hard-to-reach locations. Drones have been used successfully across many sectors from surveillance and security to photography and surveying, inspection of infrastructure and agriculture, aid provision, and environmental monitoring. Most of these activities involve flights within Visual-Line-of-Sight (VLOS), where the operator retains visual contact with the drone at all times. In contrast, large-scale commercial drone logistics services (i.e., payload delivery) require flights Beyond-Visual-Line-of-Sight (BVLOS) that entail more risk and require specific permissions, particularly in densely populated urban areas, which are key reasons why such services are not prevalent except for some medical use cases in Africa.With a particular focus on medical use cases, and using first-hand experience of operating BVLOS flights, this chapter will discuss the practical realities of integrating drones into existing urban logistics supply chain infrastructures, specifically:i) Public acceptance of drones for urban logistics purposes.ii) Payload capabilities of drones relative to the service demand.iii) Adherence to client quality assurance requirements when transporting sensitive payloads.iv) Implications of dangerous goods regulations for drone payloads.v) Implications of air and ground risks on route planning and optimisation.vi) Mechanisms for integrating drones alongside crewed aircraft in shared airspace.vii) Overall service reliability given weather conditions and minimal risk routing.viii) Cost implications of utilising drones as part of multi-modal urban logistics supply chains.<br/

Benefits of shared-fleet horizontal logistics collaborations: Patient service vehicles collecting pathology samples – a case study in a public sector healthcare setting

Road-based logistics can be associated with inefficiencies due to vehicles travelling with less-than-full loads. Shared-fleet logistics, involving horizontal collaboration between organizations to consolidate loads and improve vehicle utilization through sharing vehicle capacity, can reduce such inefficiencies, and thereby reduce costs, vehicle-kilometers (vkm), related vehicle emissions and traffic congestion. Utilizing a significant historic dataset of vehicle movements, the potential cost savings and environmental benefits of a shared-fleet operation involving collaboration between two public sector organizations, integrating both static (fixed-schedule) and dynamic (client specific) transport demands within a healthcare setting were quantified. The pathology Sample Collection Service (SCS; responsible for transporting pathology samples from doctors’ surgeries to laboratories for analysis) shared spare capacity in ambulances operated by the non-emergency Patient Transport Service (PTS; responsible for transporting eligible patients to/from routine hospital appointments) as an alternative to engaging an external courier company for sample transport. Results suggested that a shared-fleet collaboration transporting samples generated by a network of 78 doctors’ surgeries to a centralized pathology laboratory, alongside normal patient loads, in an average of 24 ambulances/day produced a reduction in costs of 20%, and a reduction in both vkm and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 13%. Decision-makers within public sector organizations that operate own-account vehicle fleets could pursue policies that actively seek-out opportunities to deploy shared-fleet solutions to improve vehicle utilization and therefore reduce public sector spending

Benefits of shared-fleet horizontal logistics collaborations: a case study of patient service vehicles collecting pathology samples in a public sector healthcare setting

Road-based logistics suffer from inefficiencies due to less-than-full load vehicle movements. Consolidating loads through shared-fleet collaborations (also known as freight pooling) can reduce such inefficiencies, and thereby reduce costs, vehicle-kilometres (vkm), and related emissions and congestion. Utilising a significant historical dataset of vehicle movements, the potential cost savings and environmental benefits of a shared-fleet operation involving collaboration between two public sector organisations, integrating both static (fixed-schedule) and dynamic (client-specific) demand within a healthcare setting, were quantified. A Sample Collection Service (SCS; transporting pathology samples from doctors’ surgeries to centralised laboratories for analysis) shared spare capacity in vehicles operated by a Patient Transport Service (PTS; transporting eligible non-emergency patients to/from routine hospital appointments) as an alternative to engaging an external courier company. Results suggested that a shared-fleet collaboration servicing 78 surgeries, alongside normal patient loads in an average of 24 PTS vehicles/day, produced reductions of 16%, 13% and 12% in costs, vkm and carbon dioxide emissions, respectively. Decision-makers within public sector organisations that operate own-account vehicle fleets could pursue policies that actively seek out opportunities to deploy shared-fleet solutions to improve vehicle utilisation and therefore reduce public sector spending and the detrimental effects of road logistics

Co/Pt multilayer-based magnetic tunnel junctions with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy

Kugler Z, Grote J-P, Drewello V, Schebaum O, Reiss G, Thomas A. Co/Pt multilayer-based magnetic tunnel junctions with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. Journal of Applied Physics. 2012;111(7): 07C703.Temperature-dependent transport measurements of magnetic tunnel junctions with perpendicularly magnetized Co/Pt electrodes are presented. Magnetization measurements of the Co/Pt multilayers are performed to characterize the electrodes. The interface magnetization of the Co layers at the Pt interface is estimated in dependence of the annealing temperature. The effect of the annealing temperature on the tunneling magnetoresistance effect of the magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) is investigated. Tunneling magnetoresistance ratios of about 19% at room temperature are attained and two well-defined switching fields are observed. The tunneling magnetoresistance of Co/Pt based tunnel junctions changes by a factor of 1.9 if cooled to 13 K. The results are compared to measurements of MTJs with Co-Fe-B electrodes and in-plane anisotropy. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics

Public acceptance of the use of drones for logistics: the state of play and moving towards more informed debate

Policy makers are keen to understand public and stakeholder concerns in relation to the greater deployment of drones within transport systems and studies have sought to quantify public acceptance of drones with common themes including worries relating to privacy and safety and a lack of engagement with the technology amongst some demographic groups. This paper critically examines the research on public acceptance of drones finding the conflation of a diverse range of drone applications has led to ambiguity in the prevailing concerns and that the absence of clear parameters for drone use in local transport environments limits scope to develop informed opinion. We find that studies which build familiarity and understanding of practical drone use demonstrate the potential for more positive and informed outcomes than do more generic surveys on attitudes. The paper raises questions about the role of public acceptance research and its use in policy and calls for studies that build understanding of drones within transport environments so that stakeholders can engage in more informed debates to shape future transport provision

Integrating drones into NHS patient diagnostic logistics systems: flight or fantasy?

Healthcare accounts for approximately 5% of emissions in developed nations, and the public healthcare provider in the United Kingdom (UK), the National Health Service (NHS), has set a target to reach net-zero emissions by 2040 without detriment to its quality of patient care. With Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs; a.k.a. drones, UAS, or RPAS) starting to be used in health care systems outside the UK, there is increasing interest in how they could be integrated into NHS operations for the more efficient and faster movement of diagnostic specimens. Reflecting on a business-as-usual analysis of current NHS diagnostic specimen logistics across the Solent region of Southern UK, this paper critically evaluates the practical reality of integrating UAV deliveries of this commodity, identifying the benefits and challenges that must be addressed by stakeholders to realise commercial UAV services, including dangerous goods legislation, cargo stability, routing, and weather. In the exploratory desktop analysis, 14 out of 79 surgeries could be realistically served by a 5m wingspan vertical take-off/landing (VTOL) UAV: seven directly, and seven through ground-based logistics transfers. The results suggested that an average of 1,628 samples could be served by UAV each week, resulting in 42 flights/week with 10 taxi services to cover periods where weather limits flying. This resulted in an approximate total service cost of £2,964/week if regulations develop to relax UAV personnel constraints. Whilst this created a 23% reduction in tailpipe emitted CO2 (excl. taxis) and a 20% reduction in van logistics costs, an overall cost increase of 56% was returned, making any long-term UAV service financially unsustainable. Accounting for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, congestion, and air pollution costs, the UAV intervention reduced the marginal external costs of the system by £196 per week (GHG = £81 reduction, congestion = £116 reduction, air pollution – NOx, PM2.5 = &lt;£1 reduction)

Investigating the crash protection performance of a medical carrier bag for drone transport

Drone transport regulations in Europe require a crash protected container (CPC) to be used for carriage of dangerous goods. With increasing interest in the use of drones for medical logistics, the motivation behind this research was to investigate whether existing approved medical carriers could also pass as a CPC. To date, there has been little practical experimentation or theoretical research into the crash protection performance of medical containers. Addressing this gap, this paper reports findings from a series of drop test experiments to investigate the crashworthiness of a standard medical carrier bag used by the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. Drop tests were performed from heights of up to 122 m using standard medical carriers containing bags of dyed saline to examine the robustness of the carrier and whether it could contain any leakages, a key requirement for transporting dangerous goods. Tests found that the medical carrier failed on some drops, with the zipped lid being identified as the main weakness. New understanding of the carrier’s terminal velocity, impact acceleration, and failure mechanisms were gained, and subsequent strengthening and waterproofing remedial measures recommended. New insights and practical recommendations are provided relating to performing the formal drop test and how to conduct these using a drone