Impact of Autonomous and Human-Driven Trucks on Flexible Pavement Design

Abstract

Truck platooning with autonomous and connected vehicles has several advantages compared with traditional trucking. Platooning improves overall road safety and reduces fuel consumption by up to 15%. This is a result of the advanced control systems and high steering accuracy of autonomous vehicles. These advanced control systems present an opportunity to pavement design engineers, as the lateral positions of the vehicles could be altered to create less damaging loading scenarios. This study introduces an expected response framework to quantify the impact of lateral position on pavement performance. Using the expected response framework, any mixture of human-driven and autonomous vehicles can be analyzed by characterizing lane position as a mixture probability distribution instead of point loads. Pavement damage can subsequently be computed by using the expectation of the responses. This approach requires little computational effort and is easily incorporated in any mechanistic–empirical design or optimization framework. The approach is illustrated by analyzing four flexible pavement sections using the expected response framework. Compared with human-driven trucks, optimized lateral position could decrease pavement damage by 40%. Channelized traffic on the other hand could increase pavement damage by 60%. A simplified approach is introduced alongside a reliability analysis and fragility curves for various pavement structures. Distributed traffic was found to have the lowest probability of failure among all traffic scenarios.

Optimization of Platoons’ Lateral Position Based on Damage Estimation

“…The damage caused by a distribution of truck positions is estimated using a recently developed method ( 9 ). The method is based on estimating expected maximum strain for many load repetitions, by multiplying the profiles of truck distribution and the strain resulting from each load repetition according to Equation 1:…”

“…The damage caused by a distribution of truck positions is estimated using a recently developed method (9).…”

“…Recently, a closed-form method to estimate pavement damage based on the input distribution of truck positions was introduced ( 9 ). A strain diagram of an individual truck pass is associated with the long-run distribution of truck positions.…”

Economic and Environmental Impacts of Platoon Trucks on Pavements

“…where However, the accumulation of rutting is not linear. In studies by Al-Qadi and co-workers, they reported that rut depth owing to truck pass i should be related to the rut depth owing to truck pass i-1 (14). The rut depth of AC layer was evolved from Equation 3.…”

“…Although the Wander 2D approach detailed damage profiles as a function of lateral position ( 13 ), it is computationally expensive to perform analytical computation for each single pass over many years of pavement service life. Okte and Al-Qadi have also proposed a computationally friendly probabilistic approach to estimate the expected response of pavement structure under various configurations of platoon trucks ( 14 ). Given the expected strain response, it is possible to estimate the corresponding pavement damage (fatigue cracking and rutting) caused by platoon truck travel and conduct sustainability assessment of pavement.…”