Networked control challenges in collaborative road freight transport.

Freight transport is of major importance for the European economy and is growing thanks to increasing global trade. About three quarters of inland freight transport in the European Union is on roads. It has the potential to go through a dramatic change over the next decades thanks to the recent development of technologies such as wireless communication, cloud computing, sensor devices, and vehicle electronics. They enable a new integrated goods transport system based on optimized logistics, real-time traffic information, vehicular communications, collaborative driving, and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we discuss challenges in creating a more efficient and sustainable goods road transportation system and how some of them can be tackled with a networked control approach. In particular, we discuss a method to improve the efficiency of the transportation system by minimizing the number of empty transports needed to fulfill the assignments on a given road network. Assignments with overlapping route segments might lead to further improvements, as the formation of vehicle platoons yields reduced fuel consumption. For realistic scenarios, it is shown that such collaboration opportunities arise already with relatively few vehicles. The fuel-efficient formation and control of platoons is also discussed. Some of the presented methods have been tested on real vehicles in traffic. The paper shows experimental results on automatic formation of vehicle platoons on a Swedish highway. The influence of traffic density on the merge maneuver is illustrated. The results indicate that platoon coordination could be improved by support from appropriate traffic monitoring technologies.