Logistics and the networked society: A conceptual framework for smart network business models using electric autonomous vehicles (EAVs)

The full adoption of electric autonomous vehicles (EAVs) will revolutionise the global transport system in general and road freight transport in particular. Traditional business models based on manufacturers selling trucks to operators could conceivably disappear. As with passenger transport, the rapid obsolescence of the technology and the cost will drive a non-ownership model and an evolution from products to services. Therefore it is expected that a new network operator will emerge to run this service, which in the future will likely develop into a fully smart network. As the value of the truck technology is reduced and the software component becomes the core source of value creation, it opens up the possibility of new entrants to the market who do not need to purchase physical assets at all and may instead rent them from a competitive pool of asset providers. Despite the recent growth in research on Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in passenger transport, these issues have been neglected in freight transport. The goal of this paper is to establish the features of this new smart network and derive a range of potential business models incorporating the changing roles of each actor, which are then evaluated against an analytical framework of business model innovation. The research concludes by proposing an update to the well-known OECD transportation model to include the network operator concept.