Freight Demand Modeling Study in Sweden Predicted Eight Percent Reduction in Total System Cost for a Fully Driverless Truck Fleet Compared to Baseline Scenario of All Manually Driven Trucks.
Two Types of Truck Operational Scenarios Were Compared Using National Freight Transport Model in Sweden.
Sweden
Impacts of large-scale driverless truck adoption on the freight transport system
Summary Information
Automated driving technology offers great potential for road freight transport in terms of economic, safety, and operational benefits, due to a significant reduction of total cost of ownership for road transport operators of driverless trucks (DL- truck). This study analyzed the potential impacts of large-scale adoption of DL-trucks on transport patterns and system costs for a national freight transport system in Sweden as the case study, with the base scenario representing the state of the Swedish freight transport system in 2017 without DL-trucks.
METHODOLOGY
This study extended the application domain of the Swedish national freight transport model based on 290 Swedish zones and 298 international zones, to analyze two types of DL-truck scenarios, in addition to the baseline scenario representing the case without DL-trucks. The first scenario represented a full adoption of DL-trucks. In the second scenario, the existing fleet of manually driven trucks (MD-truck) was complemented by DL-trucks that can operate on major roads between logistics hubs, but not in busy urban areas. The road network contained 705 terminals. The approach for the scenario analysis was to analyze the impacts of DL-trucks under varying conditions in terms of the operating model used (DL-trucks on all roads or DL-trucks hub-to-hub), the operating costs for DL-trucks (low, mid, high cost levels), and for the DL-trucks hub-to-hub (H2H) model, parts of the road network DL-trucks can operate.
FINDINGS
- Results for both scenarios indicated significant increases in road freight transport compared to baseline; 22 percent increase for All DL-truck scenario and 11 percent for H2H scenario.
- The annual decrease in total system costs (both domestic and international) was estimated to be eight percent for All DL-truck and five percent for H2H compared to the baseline scenario (€1.7 billion [approximately $1.84 billion USD] and €1.2 billion [approximately $1.30 billion USD] reductions, respectively, from the baseline value of €22.4 billion [approximately $24.22 billion USD]).
