United States Department of Transportation
i
Quantitative Evaluation of Truck Caravanning
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2023-01-01
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[PDF-958.45 KB]
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Edition:Final Report
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Abstract:Truck caravanning is closely related to the truck platooning concept but is defined as a convoy of trucks with the first driven by a human driver, while the following trucks operate as SAE Level 5 autonomous vehicles. The primary contribution of this project is to quantify the benefits of caravanning coordination. At this direction, we propose two caravan scheduling problems. The initial mathematical model considers a restrictive case of truck caravanning, where all trucks must form caravans to reach the destination. Additionally, a hybrid truck caravan scheduling problem is developed, where a truck is given the option to not participate in a caravan and follow the traditional shortest origin-destination path. The purpose of the hybrid model is to reap the maximum benefit from this scheduling, reducing the inevitable wasting time at caravan coupling points. Both programs are linear mixed integer and are solved exact with GAMS/CPLEX with optimality gap less than 1%. The cost benefit of truck caravanning models derives through the comparison with a traditional shortest path origin-destination model. Multiple network instances are used to evaluate the proposed models and results indicate that cost savings could reach up to 50% when compared to the single truck scheduling, and that the optimal caravan size (if one takes under consideration traffic flow, safety, and the complexity of forming and operating higher capacity caravans) is equal to five. The results indicate also that the caravans that are formed, irrespective of the network, will utilize the full caravan capacity, set by the decision maker. Finally, the sensitivity analysis between important parameters provides a robust insight of concept’s profitability.
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