Trucks

Urban parcel delivery has emerged as a high growth market, and the resulting delivery traffic can pose great challenges in dense urban areas. There is growing interest in supplanting the conventional model of a dedicated delivery person operating a van to alternatives featuring new classes of vehicles such as drones, autonomous ground vehicles, cargo bikes and non-motorized vehicles. This work proposes combined delivery strategies using trucks, cargo bikes and drones. We develop and compare multi-modal delivery strategies with various mode combinations. We work on zone-based multi-modal...

Heavy duty truck mechanical configuration is often tailor designed and built for specific truck mission requirements. This renders the precise derivation of analytical dynamical models and controls for these trucks from first principles challenging, tedious, and often requires several theoretical and applied areas of expertise to carry through. This article investigates deep learning and deep reinforcement learning as truck-configuration-agnostic longitudinal modeling and control approaches for heavy duty trucks. The article outlines a process to develop and validate such models and...

Building control systems for heavy duty trucks have historically been dependent on availability of the details of the mechanical configuration of each target truck. This article investigates transfer and robustness of continuous control systems learned using model free deep-RL as an alternative; a configuration agnostic strategy for control system development. For this purpose, deep-RL cruise control policies are developed and validated in simulation and field experiments using two differently configured trucks; full-size Volvo and Freightliner trucks. Their performance are validated for...

Decarbonization and electrification of long-haul trucks are notoriously difficult due to the high energy demand and limited gravimetric energy density of lithium-ion cells. In this study, we investigate the optimal deployment and operation of a grid-connected battery swapping station (BSS) for electric long-haul trucks as a mixed-integer optimization problem. We construct a model for reliably meeting customer energy needs while providing grid services, to demonstrate the business case and the operation of such a system. The impact of optimal sizing of the station is explored. A comparative...