Modeling Freight Transportation as a System-of-Systems to Determine Adoption of Emerging Vehicle Technologies

The U.S. freight transportation system is a complex agglomeration of interacting systems that includes line-haul and urban delivery vehicles, inter and intra-city highways, and support infrastructure. In order to project the evolution of the system and the market penetration of emerging freight vehicle technologies, it is important to model the aforementioned interconnections, public adoption preferences, and operational and policy constraints that impact it. In this paper, we propose a system-of-systems engineering approach to define the scope of influential mechanisms and abstract an appropriate model of the U.S. freight transportation system with focus on a line-haul scenario. Implementation over a multi-city network is posed as a constrained mixed-integer linear program. The allocation and operation of three vehicle architectures—conventional diesel, diesel platooning, and battery electric—are optimized over a multi-city network to minimize the fleet-wide total cost of ownership over a twenty-year time horizon. We examine the effects of projected changes in energy cost, freight demand, and hoursof-service regulations on the annual market share evolution of these technologies.