UPS said its ORION route-optimization system would cut 100 million driving miles a year

UPS spent years building ORION, short for On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation, software that computes efficient pickup and delivery routes for its drivers. In a March 2, 2015 release, the company said that when ORION was fully deployed across US routes, it expected to reduce driving by about 100 million miles a year, save 10 million gallons of fuel, cut 100,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions, and save more than 300 million dollars annually. UPS said it had already realized a reduction of 6 to 8 miles driven per route. ORION is an operations-research and analytics system rather than a deep-learning model, but it became one of the most-cited examples of optimization at industrial scale, and it won the 2016 Franz Edelman Award.