Centre for Sustainable Road Freight Transport

d5704d07-6747-4bc9-b840-d56866867a10

Closed

EPSRC
EPSRC
EPSRC
EPSRC
EPSRC

£22,118,915

Dec. 1, 2012

May 31, 2018

The CfSRFT brings together two of the UK's leading academic groups to make road freight economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. This will be the first time that a team of international standing has fully addressed the complete 'triple bottom line' of sustainability in the sector. The team combines expertise in logistics, road freight vehicle engineering, human factors and sustainability. It will work in partnership with industry players, who will help set the research agenda and drive the adoption of results by the road freight industry.

The overall aims of the Centre are to:
(i) perform a comprehensive programme to research on the sustainability of road freight transport: from tactical to strategic; fundamental to applied; micro and macro-level perspectives
(ii) develop innovative technical and operational solutions to road freight transport challenges
(iii) assess solutions to meet short, medium and long-term Government emissions reduction targets for the road freight sector, in particular, develop an achievable roadmap to provide an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions due to road freight transport by 2050

The research of the Centre will be run under four 'themes' coordinating the contributing disciplines, spanning the stakeholders and beneficiaries:
Core Activities: managing the research portfolio to maximise quality and impact; disseminating results, insights and technology and mapping the road freight sector's path to meeting Government's emissions targets.
Data Management, Scenario Analysis and Decision Support Tools: creating integrated databases, assembling data on logistics systems, freight traffic flows and related costs and externalities; performing studies to determine the best ways to optimise logistic operations so as to minimise CO2 emissions, developing decision-support tools for companies and policy-makers.
Optimising Long Haul Transport: optimising the energy efficiency of long haul vehicles through engineering of their size and weight, tyres, structures and aerodynamics, their management and the logistics infrastructure within which they operate.
Sustainable Urban Freight: optimising the efficiency of urban delivery vehicles through their engineering design and driver interfaces, their management and the city logistics systems within which they operate

The Centre will have six full-time research staff and six PhD students with twelve associated academic investigators. A computer officer will build software and database infrastructure and tools needed to disseminate the outputs to industry and government. A full time Manager will manage the engagement with industry and build the Centre into an economically sustainable unit capable of generating income streams from research, exploiting IP and identifying and providing services as appropriate.

The Centre will be supported by an Industrial Consortium of companies from the sector, steering the research, providing collaboration and implementation partners and providing about 20% of the funding over the first five years.
Beneficiaries of the Centre's work will include transport operators and customers within the sector, achieving higher efficiencies and reduced costs and impact. The manufacturing supply chain will gain new engineering options and design guidance in new technologies, while adjacent industries such as software and electronics will gain new product and service opportunities. Policy and decision-makers will benefit from new insights and tools, offering better information and prediction capabilities as well as a roadmap which provide practical routes to addressing emissions targets. The academic community will gain a rich and integrated data resource, a wide variety of related tools and methodologies in logistics and vehicle engineering and a centre of excellence in logistics management and heavy engineering. The public at large stand to gain from reduced cost of goods, congestion, noise and environmental impact.

Potential Impact:
The Centre benefits 6 groups of stakeholders.

Road freight transport operators, under increasing commercial and environmental pressure, seek effectiveness and efficiency, operating on an increasingly congested network with increasing contention for space and time at nodes, under pressure to reduce energy use, carbon emissions and the societal impact of running relatively large vehicles. The Centre will provide insights and tools to manage on all scales, reduce emissions and costs, and improve safety and productivity. Strategic issues of location planning, fleet size/composition planning will be informed by insights and tools from the logistics databases, analyses conducted and decision support tools provided (Theme 2). Understanding carbon reduction options and engineering and human factors trends in the industry supports timely decisions (Theme 2). Understanding engineering developments enables operators to plan and use more efficient larger vehicles, enabled by trailer design developments (Themes 3, 4). Tactically, scheduling tools and a capacity to predict congestion will be important (Themes 2, 3, 4).

Road Freight Transport customers: 75% of freight moves by road in the UK. The timeliness and cost effectiveness drives the profitability of retailers and manufacturers running 'just-in-time' operations. Enhancing decisions made by operators and policy makers impacts all those who depend on road freight performance. Theme 2 provides tools and insights to retail and logistics planners and policy-makers.

Road Freight Transport supply chain manufacturers will exploit IP from the Centre: The Centre will address the operational efficiency and environmental impact of products from the manufacturers concerned with vehicle aerodynamics, rolling resistance, energy regeneration, manoeuvrability, ease of use and public acceptability. Consortium members associated with tyre development, suspension, steering, brakes, trailers and prime movers will contribute to and benefit from the work. Multidisciplinary teams will help manufacturers explore system-wide implications, while collaborating with each other in order to realise the full benefit. (Themes 3, 4)

Adjacent industries: Other suppliers will benefit; e.g. developers of satellite navigation systems interested in data development, analysis and tools (Theme 2), guidance on human factors, understanding user needs and mental models (Theme 2) and exploring how to deliver information to best effect to the driver or user (Themes 2 & 4). We will map out contribution to emerging industries (Theme 1), e.g. driving product development in security applications via vision systems able to track objects, robust against noisy data or missing sources. We will be agnostic about applications; e.g. the human factors insights into systemic structures may identify new information formats for decision support of wide and profound impact.

Policy makers: The road network and its users is a complex system with emergent properties. The decisions of policy makers have profound effects on the behaviour of actors and the performance of the whole system. The centre's work will provide new insights from creating and analysing integrated data, opening up new options and exploring likely impacts from policy measures (Theme 2). Addressing concerns about energy use, environmental impact, system performance, resilience in the face of traffic growth and disruption, the Centre will provide a vital resource to help policy makers' roadmap future strategy, exploring options and consequences of their decisions.

Society: All are affected by the road transport system; benefits from its use, its costs, its social and environmental impact. The Centre's work will affect the citizens of the UK, through the decisions of policy makers and freight transport operators and the resulting performance of the system, and in the performance and acceptability of the vehicles themselves in long haul and urban applications.