A thriving economy needs an efficient freight transport system since it also ensures high life quality. Intelligent transportation systems comprising of 3D printing and driverless locomotives are the future of fabrication and autonomous trains. They could provide such efficiency because they impact all goods’ flow stages, from origin to consumption. These emerging long mile delivery solutions impact international trade, logistics and transportation as they increase security and safety, physical infrastructure capacity and transportation systems usage and decrease freight transport environmental effects.
Implications
Future fabrication aspects such as 3D printing maximize material saving while manufacturing and customizing sophisticated and unsophisticated products, allowing manufacturers to incur low costs. 3D printing is different from conventional manufacturing processes, which require assembling many parts because it produces sizeable final product pieces in a single process (Jumaah & Szary, 2018). This technology de-globalizes product production as it brings manufacturing closer to consumers and thus affects the logistics industry through less international trade. It would make inventories and warehouse spare parts and new products useless because products' fabrication would occur on demand. 3D printing could also affect product distribution by disrupting the global supply chain as driverless locomotives thrive. Autonomous trains represent a vehicle automation degree that improves transport reliability, productivity and flexibility. While shrinking costs, they could lower travel time and increase environmental safety but deny drivers job opportunities (Bucsky, 2018). Therefore, 3D printing and driverless locomotives could reduce transportation activity and transfer of goods worldwide, leading to a significant percentage of supply chain costs.
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Conclusion
3D printing could reduce international trade as consumers demand fewer products from other nations since they could fabricate them faster. Logistics suppliers could have fewer opportunities due to increased re-bundling of manufacturing processes in single facilities. On the other hand, driverless locomotives could simplify the distribution of products, but unfortunately, lead to the loss of jobs since train drivers may be unnecessary.
References
Bucsky, P. (2018). Autonomous vehicles and freight traffic: towards better efficiency of road, rail or urban logistics? Urban Development , 58(1), pp. 41–51. DOI: 10.2478/udi-2018-0022
Jumaah, O. & Szary, P. (2018). A study on 3D printing and its effects on the future of transportation. CAIT-UTC-NC19 . https://cait.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/cait-utc-nc19-final.pdf
