Cyber-Physical Control of Road Freight Transport

Freight transportation is of outmost importance for our society and is continuously increasing, particularly in the emerging economies. At the same time, transporting goods on roads accounts for about 26% of all energy consumption and 18% of greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union. Despite the influence the transportation system has on our energy consumption and the environment, road transportation is mainly done by individual long-haulage trucks with no real-time coordination or global optimization. In this talk, we discuss how modern information and communication technology supports a cyber-physical transportation system architecture with an integrated logistic system coordinating fleets of trucks traveling together in vehicle platoons. From the reduced air drag, platooning trucks traveling close together can save more than 10% of their fuel consumption. Control and estimation challenges and solutions on various level of this transportation system will be presented. It will be argued that a system architecture utilizing vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication enable receding horizon optimal control of individual trucks as well as optimised vehicle fleet collaborations. Experiments done on European highways will illustrate system performance and safety requirements. The presentation will be based on joint work with collaborators at KTH and at the truck manufacturer Scania.