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Pros And Cons Of Truck Platooning

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In the TNO (Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research) white paper “Truck Platooning: Driving the Future of Transportation” by Janssen, Zwijnenberg, Blankers, and Kruijff, the practicalities, benefits, and technologies of truck platooning are discussed. While their focus of truck platooning covers the Netherlands and Europe, this idea is universal and can easily be applied to North America. Truck platooning is the concept of two or more trucks following each other at an interval of less than one second apart using a combination advanced automated driving technologies, but primarily cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) and wireless communications (Janssen, Zwijnenberg, Blankers, & Kruijff, 2015).

I believe autonomous …show more content…

Janssen et al. address that a variety of automated driving technologies to include radar, cameras, GPS, INS, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) could be incorporated, but the primary technologies platooning will rely on will be CACC and wireless communications, which with supporting senors would be able to control the platoon and keep the trucks at a set …show more content…

discuss several benefits of truck platooning and the ones I found most important are fuel economy, driver productivity, and vehicle congestion. The most immediate benefit would be the ability to draft, reducing the drag of the following vehicle and increasing fuel economy, which also leads to reduced emissions. Drag reduction due to draft would always be a benefit regardless of how many trucks in the platoon and even if each truck had an active operator. The fuel wasted on human error would also be saved as human induced braking and acceleration would be eliminated. Janssen et al. also touch on driver productivity as a benefit but would be only increase as the burden of the following driver is lifted. The more automated the platoon becomes the less work the following drivers would have to do and eventually they would be taken out of the picture completely, leading to less drivers and more trucks. Finally Janssen et al. discuss the ability to save space on the road and reduce congestion. Driving as it currently is leaves a space between vehicles which is dependent on the driver and the faster two vehicles go, the greater the distance between them become. Platooning would largly reduce this gap up to 46%, depending on speed. The more trucks in the platoon, the more space

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