Evaluating Cost Savings from Truck Caravanning

Truck platooning and related autonomous vehicle coordination concepts have been proposed as sustainable ways to increase profits and improve service quality. Recently the concept of truck caravanning, a hybrid truck platooning with only one truck driver required per platoon, has been proposed in the literature. This paper describes the research effort in developing a model that can estimate the cost savings of truck caravanning. The motivation of the proposed model is to investigate if substantial monetary savings exist to justify the initial capital investment (both in equipment and infrastructure) required for the implementation of the truck caravanning concept. A linear programming model is developed and used to evaluate different size networks. Results from numerical experiments indicate that a caravan size of four trucks or greater is needed for significant cost savings to be achieved and that driver compensation is the most critical factor dictating profitability.