Logistics digital twin: how to cut truck waiting time at the gate

The problem: the 3-hour gate

Before 6 am, 113 trucks are already lined up at the gate of a distribution hub. The average wait is 3.3 hours. After the free window every truck costs detention fees, and at peak the bill reaches about €27k a day. Drivers miss their next slot, cut-offs slip and the whole day starts late.

These are figures from a modelled demo scenario, but anyone who runs a hub will recognise them.

Six systems, not one answer

The data to fix it usually exists. It is spread across systems that were never designed to talk to each other:

• the yard management system knows where trailers are parked;
• the dock schedule knows which doors are booked;
• the warehouse management system knows what is ready to load;
• the gate cameras see every truck arrive.

Each shows a piece of the problem. None shows the answer, so the morning meeting becomes an argument about whose numbers are right.

Who a logistics digital twin is for

• Hub and distribution centre managers. fighting queues, detention fees and missed cut-offs.
• Operations directors. running several sites who need one comparable picture.
• 3PLs and carriers. that want to prove turnaround times to their customers.
• Ports, rail terminals and cross-docks. with the same gate-and-dock bottleneck.

What the digital twin does

A digital twin joins those systems into one live picture of the hub. A platform like Synopton works in four steps:

It counts and times every truck. Camera AI detects each truck at the gate and records how long it waits. The cameras a hub already owns become sensors.

It answers "why?" with sources. A manager asks why trucks wait three hours, and the answer comes from the hub's own data, each figure traced to where it came from.

It tests the fix before anyone changes a shift. The what-if view re-runs the day with levers such as a night receiving window, booked dock slots and night replenishment, and shows how the queue, the fees and on-time delivery move.

It turns the result into a plan. The manager approves the version that works. In the demo scenario: 12 minutes at the gate, no waiting fees, about €25k a day saved, or €1.5m over 60 peak days (modelled).

What it connects to

Yard and warehouse systems, dock schedules, maintenance and ERP data, IoT sensors and CCTV. Connections are read-only, so nothing writes back into operational systems. It runs in your cloud or as a hosted service. Every figure is labelled measured, modelled, published or assumed, which is what makes the answers usable in a meeting.

Beyond logistics

The same pattern pays off wherever a site leaks money in places nobody is watching: offshore energy assets, hospitals, data centres, construction sites, hotels and office buildings.

How Codset builds digital twins

We build digital twins end to end: the data platform underneath, the live 3D model, computer vision on existing cameras, the AI layer that answers with sources and the dashboards leadership reads. Our data and digital twins service covers the full build. Systwin, an industrial twin for governance and HSE, and Gemini Atlas, a multi-site twin with executive briefings, are two platforms built by the Codset team.

A dedicated Product team starts at €13,900 a month, and the configurator prices any mix of roles.

Fix your gate

Tell us about the site: how many docks, which systems you run and where the queue builds. Write to info@codset.com or send a brief, and we come back with a plan for your twin.

Questions buyers ask