Ph.D. student Osman Erman Gungor will present, “Leveraging Autonomy in Truck Platooning to Improve Freight Transportation Sustainability,” at the Kent Seminar Thursday, Dec. 6. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided starting at noon. All are welcome to attend and obtain PDH/CEU hours.

Abstract:

Introduction to autonomous and connected trucks (ACTs) is expected to result in drastic changes in operational characteristics of freight shipments, which may, in turn, have significant impacts on efficiency, safety, energy consumption, and infrastructure durability. One important change would be the formation of truck platoons, which will be more feasible and practical with the intelligent technologies existing in ACTs that enable the connection among vehicles and between vehicles and infrastructure. Some of the reported and expected benefits of platooning are reducing congestion, braking/accelerating, and fuel efficiency. Yet, such platooning operations may accelerate the damage accumulation within pavement structures because of their similar lateral positions (i.e., wheel wander) within the lane. Therefore, this study develops a platooning control strategy for a fleet of ACTs such that trucks’ lateral shifts within a lane can be explicitly optimized to minimize damage to the pavement, thus significantly reducing maintenance and rehabilitation costs. The efficacy of the proposed strategy was demonstrated through a case study. In the future, the developed framework will be extended to network level evaluation by incorporating difference pavement design parameters, traffic, and climatic conditions.

Bio:

Osman Erman Gungor received his B.S. degree in civil engineering from Middle East Technical University, Turkey, in 2012 and his M.S. degree in civil engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA, in 2015. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in civil engineering at UIUC. Since 2013, he has been a research assistant with the Illinois Center for Transportation under the supervision of Professor Imad Al-Qadi. His research interests include the quantification of autonomous and connected trucks on transportation infrastructures, development of machine learning models to assess the effects of environmental and traffic loading on transportation infrastructures, the evaluation of pavement surface using computer vision techniques, and numerical modeling of pavement materials. Mr. Gungor’s awards and honors include Mavis future faculty fellowship, Illinois Asphalt Pavement Association scholarship, Airport Cooperative Research Program award, European Union Erasmus Scholarship, Sabanci Holding Fellowship, and the best paper of the year by Turkish Road Association.