Optimizing Fleet Rotation Towards a More Energy Efficient Future

PACCAR, the American Fortune 500 company and leading truck manufacture, has been working with the Ohio State University under an academic-industry partnership. Under this partnership, Ohio State and PACCAR are already working on the Super Truck 2 program, and they have successfully applied for another proposal funded by the Department of Energy under the Energy Efficient Mobility System (EEMS).

With the development of new powertrain technologies, fleet operators now have to choose from a wide range of trucks, each with a distinctive energy consumption profile. This newly funded three-year project, Co-optimization of Vehicle And Routes (CoVAR), aims to help the operators find the best fleet combination of truck portfolios. Working together with PACCAR, Esri, NERL and VALENCE, the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) could help the operators find the most appropriate strategies for different payloads and operations through modeling and simulating various possible combinations of trucks, fleet rotations and routes.

Qadeer Ahmed, Research Associate Professor with Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department and Principle Investigator of the CoVAR project, is excited about the significance of this collaboration, “This project shows the confidence of industry on the interdisciplinary research happening at CAR. It will also provide Ohio State students with the opportunity to work with our industry partners and national labs.”

Written by David Wang, CAR Writing Intern