Current artificial intelligence (AI) technology could potentially predict almost half of all fleet breakdowns, says Epyx.

Epyx says AI is the next step forward for fleet management technology

Projects carried out by the automotive solutions firm have revealed that shifting to AI could create new cost management opportunities and improve operational efficiencies. And while a range of barriers remain, these issues can certainly be ironed out, it says.

The two pilots, based around its 1link Service Network platform used by fleets to manage service, maintenance and repair (SMR), explored adopting machine learning to examine data and identify patterns. They found AI could potentially improve automated SMR authorisation rates and simplify rule management for maintenance controllers.

Andy Partridge, technology delivery director at Epyx and R2C, continued: “Looking ahead, in an ideal scenario, AI would learn to identify points of failure on fleet cars, vans and trucks before they happened, meaning that we could steer the driver towards the nearest workshop that could help them before the breakdown occurred. This kind of pre-emptive action would obviously have huge value for fleets.

“The good news is that the technology is already capable of doing this to a quite impressive degree. At least one of the AI projects undertaken by a large UK fleet operator, demonstrated at the London Amazon Web Services Summit in June, identified almost 50% of vehicle failures before they happened in an exercise that looked at data retrospectively. However, a series of hurdles remain that present varying degrees of difficulty.”

The three key areas where issues needed to be solved were quality of data throughout the process, obtaining time-sensitive data, and building processes that can handle large streams of information and events – often in real time, Partridge added.

But he said all these issues certainly could be overcome and Epyx believes there’s potential to bring products to market that make the capabilities of AI accessible to fleets in the future.

“We’re upbeat about the possibilities of offering fleets the predictive capabilities of AI. Within our wider parent organisation Fleetcor, we are already piloting AI technologies in South America. The potential is considerable and we see it very much as the next step forward for the fleet management technology in which Epyx has been a leader for decades.”