This work answers the need for improvement in fuel economy in heavy duty vehicles (HDV’s), in a manner simple enough to be used in open road missions. A lookahead anticipatory control (LA) method is designed to adjust longitudinal motion (signified by velocity of the vehicle system) using knowledge of fluctuations in road grade. The prediction of driving behaviour is done using a fuzzy logic fu...

Highlights Data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and General Estimates System (GES) show that, in 2011, about 3 percent of fatal crashes, 1.7 percent of injury crashes, and 2 percent of property-damage-only (PDO) crashes involved single-unit trucks (SUTs). Crashes involving SUTs killed 1,064 people and injured about 38,000 people. Additionally, about 87,000 SUTs were involved ...

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is being developed as a heavy vehicle fuel. The reason for developing LNG is to reduce our dependency on imported oil by eliminating technical and costs barriers associated with its usage. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has a program, currently in its third year, to develop and advance costeffective technologies for operating and refueling natural gas–fueled hea...

This thesis considers computer-assisted troubleshooting of heavy vehicles such as trucks and buses. In this setting, the person that is troubleshooting a vehicle problem is assisted by a computer that is capable of listing possible faults that can explain the problem and gives recommendations of which actions to take in order to solve the problem such that the expected cost of restoring the veh...

Many applications require teams of robots to cooperatively execute complex tasks. Among these domains are some that require robots to interact closely at particular times and locations to accomplish some task components, but otherwise allow the team members to act independently. Successful execution in such domains often requires agent interactions that must adhere to constraints of precedence....

We contribute an extension of the agent-based freight transport analysis model TAPAS-Z, whose aim is to simulate decisionmaking and other activities in transport chains. TAPAS-Z is a further development of the TAPAS model, and it enables stochastic variation, based on statistical distributions, of the locations of senders and receivers of freight, hence providing improved support for simulation...

BACKGROUND While cyclists and pedestrians are known to be at significant risk for severe injuries when exposed to road traffic accidents (RTA) involving trucks, little is known about RTA injury risk for truck drivers. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to analyze the injury severity in truck drivers following RTAs. PATIENTS AND METHODS Our local accident research unit prospectively docume...

Freight trucks are an important component of the nation s highway traffic. Due to their physical and operational characteristics, they can significantly impact traffic system performance, safety, and the travel experience of non-truck drivers. Methodological gaps exist in the literature on modeling car–truck interactions that do not result in crashes, especially those resulting from non-truck d...