The full truckload pickup and delivery problem with truck platooning

Truck platooning is a promising technology for reducing energy consumption, increasing vehicle safety, and improving traffic efficiency. In this paper, we examine the cost-effectiveness of truck platooning from the perspective of a freight company fulfilling full truckload pickup and delivery requests over a transportation network. During transportation, trucks can form platoons on the traversed road sections to reduce the travel costs of the following trucks. The problem is how the routing and scheduling of trucks should be determined to take full advantage of truck platooning and minimize the total transportation cost. We propose two model formulations over a time-expanded network for this problem: a direct delivery model and an indirect delivery model, where the indirect delivery model allows trucks to visit intermediate locations during deliveries to facilitate the formation of platoons. In both models, trucks are permitted to wait at any traversed node provided that time windows of requests are not violated. We develop an improved dynamic discretization discovery (DDD) algorithm to solve the two models exactly. Through extensive computational experiments, we find that (1) the improved DDD algorithm can increase solution accuracy with much less computational effort compared with the basic DDD algorithm; (2) the cost-saving effect of truck platooning is favorable; and (3) for freight companies operating on small transportation networks, using the direct delivery model may be more appropriate.