Effects of Working Hour Regulations and Parking Shortages on Truck Electrification

Transportation electrification is seen as one of the main paths for emissions reduction. Although battery electric trucks (BETs) are expected to be more efficient than diesel trucks and have lower operational costs, there are concerns regarding how reduced payload, limited range, and long recharge time could affect freight transport performance. However, it is essential to note that, due to working hour regulations, delivery time-windows, or a need to match their schedules with parking facilities' available times, drivers need to stop regularly regardless of the type of vehicle used. This paper studies if and how these practical constraints affect the performance gap between BETs and diesel trucks. We use a resource-constrained shortest path formulation to model the problem of planning the trip of a single BET under working hour regulations, where arrival time at charging stations is subject to time-window constraints. Computational experiments are used to study the impact of working hour regulations and parking shortages on BETs and diesel trucks' trip duration and CO2 emissions. Results show that, in scenarios with low charging power, scarce parking significantly reduces the disadvantage that BETs have in trip duration, whereas their advantage in CO2 emissions increases slightly.