Fuel Emission Reduction by The Capacitated Hybrid Truck Platooning

Truck platooning was introduced as a promising concept to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of mainly heavy-duty vehicles. The rapid technological progress of autonomous vehicles among other benefits derived from truck platooning, convinced many that the concept could transform road freight transport. However, despite the optimistic expected fuel savings by the early conducted research due to the aerodynamic drag of a convoy of trucks, actual savings are questionable and debatable as depend on many parameters (intervehicle distance, road topology, position in the platoon, etc.). The actual profitability of truck platooning strongly relies on the operational conditions of the system. This paper investigates impactful operational conditions (i.e., travel time, driver compensation ration, platoon capacity, and arrival time deadline) as well as quantifies monetary savings taking into consideration fuel emission reduction by hybrid truck platooning implementation. Multiple network instances are developed and used to evaluate the proposed model. Results indicate that cost savings reach 50% when compared to the shortest origin-destination path and suggest that the optimal hybrid truck platoon capacity is five trucks.