Analyzing Freight Truck Platoon Accessibility with Route Deviations

Shailesh Chandra,Timothy Thai

doi:10.3390/su14042130

Abstract

Truck platooning is emerging as a sustainable means of transporting goods and commodities to destinations. Platooning optimizes road space and contributes to reducing freight truck emissions. However, there has been limited research on freight truck platoon accessibility to the destination that is often necessary to understand the impact of routes on which platoon is deployed. This study develops an analytical formulation for platoon accessibility by considering the possibility of the detour of trucks forming a platoon. Analyses with four prominent interstates in California, CA, USA, show that accessibility with truck platooning on select lengths of the I-5 continues to increase for about an initial 165 miles, attains a maximum there, and starts to drop after. The other three freeways, I-10, I-405, and I-710, show a continuous increase in accessibility for their lengths and the number of ramps considered. The findings can have significant implications in determining the selection of freeway routes that could be regarded as facilitators for a truck platoon.

Highlights

Introduction and BackgroundFreight truck operations play a crucial role in sustaining a nation’s economic competitiveness and for the population’s sustenance that depends on transported goods from one location to another [1]
A detailed analysis is carried out to understand the impacts from the number of ramps considered in freight truck platoon accessibility, based on route length, non-detour probability, and assumed values of the decay parameter
With β = 1, accessibility attains a constant value at distances beyond 200 miles around n = 200 along the freight path starting from the origin

Summary

Introduction

Introduction and BackgroundFreight truck operations play a crucial role in sustaining a nation’s economic competitiveness and for the population’s sustenance that depends on transported goods from one location to another [1]. The FAST Act aimed at the sustained economic growth of the freight industry with provisions for establishing a National Multimodal. The multimodal freight provisions expressed in the FAST Act are concurrent to improvements in safety, mobility, and environment through connected vehicle technology (CVT) supported by the United. Another focus of USDOT has been to adopt automation-related technologies through the ITS Strategic Plan This has generated interest among private freight truck manufacturing companies (such as Volvo Group, Gothenburg, Sweden) to expand their fleet of next-generation commercial trucks with embedded ITS and CVT features. CVT for freight trucks still is at a very early stage of deployment in the United States, and sustainability benefits that accrue from fuel savings and reduced emissions need to be assessed first [5,6]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion