A Review of Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Heavy Duty Trucks

Due to the increasing use of automobiles, the transportation industry is facing challenges of increased emissions, driver safety concerns, travel demand, etc. Hence, automotive industries are manufacturing vehicles that produce fewer emissions, are fuel-efficient, and provide safety for drivers. Artificial intelligence has taken a major leap recently and provides unprecedented opportunities to enhance performance, including in the automotive and transportation sectors. Artificial intelligence shows promising results in the trucking industry for increasing productivity, sustainability, reliability, and safety. Compared to passenger vehicles, heavy-duty vehicles present challenges due to their larger dimensions/weight and require attention to dynamics during operation. Data collected from vehicles can be used for emission and fuel consumption testing, as the drive cycle data represent real-world operating characteristics based on heavy-duty vehicles and their vocational use. Understanding the activity profiles of heavy-duty vehicles is important for freight companies to meet fuel consumption and emission standards, prevent unwanted downtime, and ensure the safety of drivers. Utilizing the large amount of data being collected these days and advanced computational methods such as artificial intelligence can help obtain insights in less time without on-road testing. However, the availability of data and the ability to apply data analysis/machine learning methods on heavy-duty vehicles have room for improvement in areas such as autonomous trucks, connected vehicles, predictive maintenance, fault diagnosis, etc. This paper presents a review of work on artificial intelligence, recent advancements, and research challenges in the trucking industry. Different applications of artificial intelligence in heavy-duty trucks, such as fuel consumption prediction, emissions estimation, self-driving technology, and predictive maintenance using various machine learning and deep learning methods, are discussed.