Eco-friendly lane reservation-based autonomous truck transportation network design

As one of the primary sources of carbon emissions, transportation sector has proposed various measures to reduce its carbon emissions. Introducing energy-efficient and low-carbon autonomous trucks into freight transportation is highly promising, but faces various challenges, especially safety issues. This study addresses eco-friendly lane reservation-based autonomous truck transportation network design for transportation safety and low carbon emissions. It aims to optimally implement dedicated truck lanes in an existing network and design dedicated routes for autonomous truck transportation to simultaneously minimise the negative impact caused by dedicated truck lanes and carbon emissions of the entire transportation system. We first formulate this problem into a bi-objective integer linear program. Then, an epsilon-constraint-based two-stage algorithm (ETSA) is proposed to solve it based on explored problem properties. A case study based on the well-known Sioux Falls network is conducted to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model and algorithm. Computational results for 310 instances from the literature demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the epsilon-constraint combined with the proposed ILP in obtaining the Pareto front. Moreover, helpful managerial insights are derived based on sensitivity analysis.