Centre for Sustainable Road Freight 2018-2023

This programme brings together teams from Herriot Watt University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Westminster and Durham University: providing a multidisciplinary focus on the research needed to enable and underpin radical measures to decarbonise the UK's road freight transport sector. The researchers are augmented by a consortium of 22 industrial partners, drawn from users, suppliers and participants in the road logistics sector. These industrial members provide advice and guidance as well as a rapid route to prototyping and implementation of solutions.

The first 5-year programme, conducted by the same team, laid the foundations and showed that radical measures are necessary to hit the UK Government's CO2 reduction targets. It also showed that integration between logistics solutions, vehicle technology, and policy measures is essential. This experience has shaped the design of the proposed programme.

The new research programme will run for 5 years and has three themes: (i) data collection and management, (ii) logistics systems, and (iii) vehicle technology. A portfolio of 23 projects spans the themes.

The first strand of projects (funded mainly by EPSRC), will focus on reducing barriers to promising strategic, deep decarbonisation technologies and solutions. These projects will create and integrate new data, new modelling tools and decision support systems, to create new insights about technological and logistical solutions, compelling arguments for their early adoption and recommendations for the necessary policy measures. Driven by a desire to model and then quantify the benefits of radical logistics options, the models will be developed and validated with data from real freight operations by the industrial partners, collected by novel automated means. Alternative vehicle fuels and power trains and ways of significantly reducing energy consumption will be investigated.

The second strand of projects (funded mainly by EPSRC and industry) will focus on extending and optimising the capabilities of promising technologies and on increasing their impact when applied to decarbonisation of road freight. Applied research into the dynamics of logistics mode decisions and testing of novel logistics options such as horizontal collaboration, co-loading and reorganisation of logistics infrastructure, will be enabled by tools developed in the first strand. Technologies developed in the first 5 years of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight (SRF) will be tested in two separate full-scale field trials with consortium partners, funded by InnovateUK. Road-mapping will provide a mechanism for corporates, government departments and researchers to build a common view of the future.

The projects in the third strand (funded by Energy Technologies Institute) will focus on implementation of tools and practices that offer immediate impact. These include novel and powerful software systems for industry to use in data collection and for vehicle characterisation and fleet decarbonisation. Research into the drivers of strategy and policy will, likewise identify the most powerful ways to influence adoption of technologies and logistics solutions.

The Road Freight Systems Living Laboratory ('Living Lab') is the central integrating element of the SRF's five-year research programme. Almost every project in the Centre will be part of it. The Living Lab will provide a test bed to measure and model freight operations; to develop technical and logistical interventions based on real-time logistics data; to test the interventions in simulation; to develop decision support tools (several based on work done in the first 5 years of the SRF) and eventually to implement and trial the tools and systems in practice. The Living Lab will be based on an integrated software and data platform that is currently being built by the research team and industry partners.

The SRF pursues impact via the structure and content of its research programme; the makeup of its partnerships and its focus on implementation of outputs.

ROAD FREIGHT OPERATORS: facing increasing commercial and environmental pressure, seek improvements in energy consumption and CO2 emissions (targeting 80% reduction on 1990 levels by 2050), despite increasing freight demand, approximately in-line with GDP growth. The SRF will explore radical concepts for collaboration between operators, revising operations (location and layout of warehousing, co-loading, novel logistics options...) with logistics systems modelling tools to enable assessment of options using extensive real-time operational data. Operators will be aided by tools for fleet decarbonisation, planning logistics operations; and more efficient vehicles. Assessing alternative energy vectors will inform trade-offs between cost and environment. Vehicle drivers strongly influence fuel costs, emissions and safety and are influenced by the level of automation and connectivity. Driver behaviour, feedback of real-time information and training will be addressed.

ROAD FREIGHT TRANSPORT CUSTOMERS: Under margin pressure, companies seek trade-offs between logistics, environmental and other costs, and make ever-more complex strategic corporate decisions. Having models, tools and dashboards to gain deeper insight into decisions such as transport mode and horizontal collaboration opportunities and understanding the impact of future policy could mean the difference between success and failure. The programme explores some of the deeper long-term commercial and social drivers of freight demand and behaviour and how these will affect all parts of the sector.

ROAD FREIGHT SUPPLY CHAIN: This work helps manufacturers of vehicles and trailers (vehicle bodies, tyres, suspensions, power-trains, steering, brakes, aerodynamics) and providers of warehousing and material handling systems. Software advances cover decision support and planning tools for operations at all scales, support logistics and warehousing as well as data collection and management. Improvements here ripple out across the supply chain: vehicle improvements translate into lower fuel consumption, reduced costs and environmental performance.

POLICY MAKERS: The sector is complex and corporate decisions are driven by policy and vice versa. Infrastructure investments play out over many years under many influences, so integrated modelling tools are essential to understand trade-offs. Gathering data, (e.g. around congestion charging or zoning for business) is expensive so the research explores automatic vehicle tracking from video. Multi-modal transport and policies impact the cost and social benefit of road freight and so studies into mode choice and rebound are vital to avoid unintended consequences of policy decisions. Major infrastructure investments in energy provision and location will be informed by modelling energy and freight together to understand the interplay - especially as electric and gas-powered vehicles become more significant.

SOCIETY: All are affected by the road transport system; benefits, costs and its social and environmental impact. The SRF's work will affect citizens through the decisions of policy makers and freight transport operators and the resulting performance of the system, and in the performance, safety and acceptability of the vehicles themselves. Whatever policy and corporate decisions are made, society has to live with the trade-offs, exemplified by impacts on global climate change and local air quality.

INTERNATIONAL: Climate change is a global issue and the road freight fleets of developing countries will dwarf those of the UK. So the SRF is establishing partner centres in China and Africa (and India in future) to understand and address decarbonisation of freight in these markets and to disseminate research results, data and insights to maximise global impact.