Trucks

Evaluate High Potential Areas for Overweight Trucks and Truck Accidents in California

Huang, Jihua
Chan, Ching-Yao
Jang, Kitae
2013

To increase operational efficiency, reduce congestion, and meet federal requirements concerning truck size and weight limits, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is exploring new plans and feasible projects designed to increase enforcement and reduce pavement damage due to overweight trucks. Installation of Weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems or Virtual Weigh Station (VWS) by Caltrans will provide information to the California Highway Patrol (CHP) that they can use to better enforce commercial vehicle laws in those areas. To support the effective deployment of WIM/VWIM...

Development of a Heavy-Duty Diesel Modal Emissions and Fuel Consumption Model

Barth, Matthew
Younglove, Theodore
Scora, George
2005

There have been significant improvements in recent years in transportation and emissions modeling, in order to better evaluate transportation operational effects and associated vehicle emissions. In particular, instantaneous or modal emissions models have been developed for a variety of light-duty vehicles. To date, most effort has focused primarily on developing these models for light-duty vehicles with less effort devoted to Heavy-Duty Diesel (HDD) vehicles. Although HDD vehicles currently make up only a fraction of the total vehicle population, they are major contributors to the...

Industry Needs and Opportunities for Truck Platooning

Shladover, Steven E
Campbell, Robert
Kailas, Aravind
Boyd, Stephen
Torrey, Ford
2015

Representatives of the trucking industry have been surveyed to try to identify their needs and concerns related to truck platooning systems. These surveys revealed the need to provide clearer and more comprehensive descriptions of the truck platooning concepts to ensure that the respondents understand what it is and how it works. The fleet managers tended to be more receptive to truck platooning than the drivers, and even those respondents who had some prior experience driving trucks with adaptive cruise control (ACC) and forward collision warning systems were no more receptive to truck...

Definition and Evaluation of Bus and Truck Automation Operations Concepts

Tsao, H.-S. Jacob
Botha, Jan L.
2002

Traffic congestion will continue to worsen and likely worsen at a faster rate than ever. People throughput and freight throughput have become critical issues for California and the rest of the nation. PATH has been funding a one-year research project entitled "Definition and Evaluation of Bus and Truck Automation Operations Concepts," proposed by the authors. This report summarizes the results of the research project achieved during the first six months. During those six months, we reviewed literature and developed operating concepts for both urban bus automation and inter-city truck...

A Reliable Direct Drive for the Steering Wheel Column of Buses

Eirea, Gabriel
Sanders, Seth
Zhang, Wei-Bin
2005

This final reports the fault analysis of precision docking system and safety design of the safety critical elements for precision docking system. The report includes three Parts, including:Part I provides a description of the Precision Docking System and reports analysis for fault diagnosis and safety design of automated steering controller and Electronic Control Unit (ECU) for steering actuator. It also reports a demonstration PATH conducted during the National Intelligent Vehicle Initiative demonstration organized by the US Department of Transportation Joint Program Office.Part II report...

Control of Heavy-Duty Trucks: Environmental and Fuel Economy Considerations

Zhang, Jianlong
Ioannou, Petros
2004

In this project we investigate the effect of heavy-duty trucks, equipped with different Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems, on the environment and traffic flow characteristics. The sluggish dynamics of trucks whether manual or ACC that is due to their limited acceleration capabilities filter speed disturbances caused by leading vehicles and lead to beneficial effects on the environment and traffic flow characteristics. This response however may lead to higher travel times in certain situations as well as invite cut-ins from neighboring lanes causing additional disturbances. A new ACC...

Development and Performance Evaluation of AVCSS Deployment Sequences to Advance from Today's Driving Environment to Full Automation

Shladover, Steven
VanderWerf, Joel
Miller, Mark A.
Kourjanskaia, Natalia
Krishnan, Hariharan
2001

This report presents the findings of its investigation into deployment sequences to better understand the paths that could be taken from today's driving environment to vehicle-highway automation. One of the most vexing problems has always been that of determining how to advance from the present-day manually-controlled vehicles to the future fully automated vehicles. Considerable research attention has been devoted to defining the architecture and operating protocols, as well as the technology, of automated highway systems. Rather less attention has been devoted to defining the steps by...

Parameter Estimation and Supervisory Techniques for Robust Longitudinal Control of Heavy Vehicles

Druzhinina, Maria
Moklegaard, Lasse
Stefanopoulou, Anna G.
2003

This report describes the development and experimental validation of a coordination scheme between friction and discretely variable compression brakes for a Class 8 Freightliner truck used as a development platform in the California PATH program. The coordination scheme that we developed maintains the speed tracking performance of the nominal PID controller which was originally designed by the UCLA team for the case of friction brakes only. Through the coordination scheme, the command of the nominal PID controller is split into a friction brake command and compression brake command. The...

Evaluation of Bus and Truck Automation Operations Concepts

Tsao, H. S. Jacob
Zhang, Lan
Lin, Lin
Batni, Deepa
2004

Traffic congestion will continue to worsen and likely worsen at a faster rate than ever. People throughput and freight throughput have become critical issues for California and the rest of the nation. PATH has funded with approximately $125K a research project entitled "Evaluation of Bus and Truck Automation Scenarios" jointly proposed by Jan Botha (Principal Investigator) of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Jacob Tsao (Co-PI) of Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at San Jose State University. This report summarizes the major findings of the research...

Fuel Saving Achieved in the Field Test of Two Tandem Trucks

Browand, Fred
McArthur, John
Radovich, Charles
2004

The fuel consumption of two tandem trucks is recorded for truck spacings of 3, 4, 6, 8, and 10 meters. The trucks are linked by means of an electronic control system, and are operated on an unused runway at Crows Landing, California. Fuel consumption data is averaged while traveling in both directions over the same central strip of runway to cancel the effect of runway slope and to partially cancel the effect of wind. The average fuel consumption saving to be achieved by tandem operation varies from about 11% at 3-4 meters spacing to about 8% at 8-10 meters spacing.