Optimizing truck platooning transportation planning: An application to forestry products supply chains

The Fourth Industrial Revolution offers new opportunities for improving the efficiency and agility of supply chain operations such as transportation. This study explores the impact of integrating truck platooning technology in forestry products supply networks. Companies need to know how and where to use truck platooning in transportation networks to get optimum benefits from truck platooning in supply chains. To this end, a Mixed Integer Linear Programming model was developed. Decisions to be made include the selection of the potential terminal locations, the number of ordinary and platooning trucks needed in the transportation network, the origin and destination of products, and their flow in direct and backhaul routes. The objective is to minimize the overall transportation cost, including terminal location costs, fixed costs for ordinary and platoon trucks, fuel, and driver costs. A total of 27 randomly generated instances are used to test the optimization model. We considered several scenarios to analyze different combinations of using or not backhauling, having or not truck platoons in the network, and allowing or not the truck platoons to visit the forest areas. The results show that the potential savings of combining the two types of trucks are in the range of 1%-12% in the scenarios in which truck platooning transportation is allowed only between terminal and mill nodes. This savings could reach more than 20% when the truck platoons are allowed to visit forest areas, depending on how many forest areas are visited. The number of drivers can be reduced by 3% to more than 30%. In addition, using truck platooning and backhauling together could reduce fuel consumption by 15.6% on average.