Opportunities and Barriers for Truck Platooning on Norwegian Rural Freight Routes

Abstract

Truck platooning can potentially make road freight transportation safer and greener. Technological readiness, business opportunities, and acceptance of truck platooning have mainly been studied for multilane highways with ample truck volumes. Less is known about truck platooning in areas with low traffic volumes and challenging roads and weather conditions. This paper investigates the opportunities and barriers for truck platooning on Norwegian rural freight routes, through stakeholder interviews and realistic case examples. Given modest freight volumes, dispersed industry clusters, and challenging road conditions, this study identified several prerequisites to deploying platooning and achieving economic savings. The paper discusses the future steps required to organize platooning across carriers, ensure appropriate infrastructure, and gain acceptance among truck drivers, motorists, and other road users.

Overview of Numerical Analysis and Optimization Methods for Eddy Current Retarders

“…It can quickly provide preliminary design data for permanent magnet eddy current retarder. (2) The experiment shows that the Rogowski method is feasible. Using Rogowski method to solve electromagnetic field and braking torque of permanent magnet eddy current retarder is helpful to enrich and improve the calculation method of electromagnetic field and braking torque of permanent magnet eddy current retarder.…”

“…With the growth of the national economy, the demand for automobile freight is increasing, which makes the transportation industry develop rapidly. At the same time, people have higher and higher requirements for safety [1][2][3]. They all hope that the brake performance of vehicles will be better and better, and the requirements for comfort will also be strengthened day by day.…”

Operational and Infrastructure Readiness for Semi-Automated Truck Platoons on Rural Roads

“…To obtain further insights into the benefits of truck platooning on rural roads, we suggest redoing the field study with vehicle-to-vehicle communication, allowing for shorter following distances, and also performing a manual-driven baseline first.Keywords: Truck platooning (1); field trial (2); rural roads (3); road geometry (4); tunnels (5).[1,2,9,10], improved traffic flow [4,11], reduced need for road expansions [9], improved safety [2,9], and, in the longer-term, lower cost through partly or fully driverless operations [2,12] which may also mitigate driver shortages [13].However, many freight routes are rural two-way, two-lane roads [14,15] with narrow widths, challenging alignment, few median barriers, and sub-highway speed limits of 70-80 km/h. It is unlikely that earlier findings about platooning feasibility are transferrable to such roads [12]. While automation may make vehicles and infrastructure more interdependent [16][17][18], the specifications for truck platooning are largely unknown, and it is unclear how roads authorities, which may have to regulate platoons and ready their infrastructure, should prepare [19].…”

“…While automation may make vehicles and infrastructure more interdependent [16][17][18], the specifications for truck platooning are largely unknown, and it is unclear how roads authorities, which may have to regulate platoons and ready their infrastructure, should prepare [19]. This study explores platooning on Norwegian roads [20], which lend themselves well to the aforementioned description, with the added challenges of tunnels and mountain passes [12]. After a demonstration in 2018 [21], the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) conducted a full-scale platooning field study in fall 2020, during which the data used in the present study were collected.…”

“…[1,2,9,10], improved traffic flow [4,11], reduced need for road expansions [9], improved safety [2,9], and, in the longer-term, lower cost through partly or fully driverless operations [2,12] which may also mitigate driver shortages [13].…”