Underground Freight Transportation. A new development for automated freight transportation systems in the Netherlands

Underground freight transportation (UFT) is introduced as a possible alternative for transporting freight. The latest developments on UFT in the Netherlands are discussed and the OLS-ASH project is used to illustrate the designing of such highly automated freight transportation systems. The prototyping and testing performed for this system are briefly presented and some general conclusions resulting from the UFT studies in the Netherlands are discussed. The goal of this paper is to present UFT as a new development for automated freight transportation systems and discuss some of the transport technological aspects as they may be of interest for future developments in intelligent transportation systems.