Vehicle automation is expected to have a profound impact on the transport sector on the next decades. A vast amount of research has targeted the effects of automation for passenger transport, by analysing impacts on travel behavior, modal choice, new services (e.g., shared automated vehicles), traffic congestion, road capacity and so on. On the contrary, even though there are some studies on the effects of automation on trucks and freight transport, this topics has attracted less attention from researchers, and there are still many open questions.
In the present thesis, we will analyse the effects of vehicle automation and driverless operation on the truck freight sector, with applications to the Netherlands. In passenger transport, it has been already shown that automation decreases optimal vehicle size for both buses (Tirachini and Antoniou, 2020) and planes (Zakharenko and Luttmann, 2023). This is because the cost of drivers or pilots is a fixed cost per vehicle that pushes to have bigger vehicles, to transport more people per vehicle. Once this driving cost is reduced or removed, the convenience of having smaller vehicles and more frequent services arises. The same effect may also be expected for freight vehicles if trucks become driverless, as vehicle automation is also expected to significantly reduce the transport costs of a truck company (Engholm et al., 2020). However, freight operation is more complex than passenger transport regarding the effects of automation on planning decisions, given that the optimal size of trucks depends not only on the running cost of the vehicle (which is a function of having a driver or not), but also on the storage cost of the freight (warehousing, if needed) and on the cost of ordering and processing per shipment (Abate and De Jong 2014), which are processes that might also be affected by automation. Therefore, on the freight sector, the ultimate effect of automation on the design of vehicles is an open question that depends on the level of automation reached in different stages of the logistics process.
The general goal of this thesis is to analyse the effect of vehicle automation for the truck sector in the Netherlands. In particular, we will estimate effects on optimal fleet sizes and optimal vehicle sizes under different assumptions of automation deployment scenarios.
References
- Abate, M., & De Jong, G. (2014). The optimal shipment size and truck size choice–The allocation of trucks across hauls. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 59, 262-277.
- Engholm, A., Pernestål, A., & Kristoffersson, I. (2020). Cost analysis of driverless truck operations. Transportation Research Record, 2674(9), 511-524.
- Tirachini, A., & Antoniou, C. (2020). The economics of automated public transport: Effects on operator cost, travel time, fare and subsidy. Economics of Transportation, 21, 100151.
- Zakharenko, R., & Luttmann, A. (2023). Downsizing the jet: A forecast of economic effects of increased automation in aviation. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 170, 25-47.
Supervision
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