NO MORE EXCUSES: ACTION NOW FOR SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT

25 MAY 2018

“We are in the early stages of a sustainability revolution,” says former US Vice President Al Gore. Al Gore spoke at the Scania Sustainable Transport Forum in Stockholm, which gathered industry and political decision-makers to chart the pathway to achieving carbon-free heavy transport by 2050, in keeping with the Paris Agreement.

The call to action has never been more urgent. “Climate change is the most serious challenge that mankind has ever faced,” emphasised Gore. “Scientists are making the point that things are getting even worse than we predicted earlier.”

The situation is worsening as we witness shrinking glaciers, increased flooding, draughts, heat waves, unprecedented heavy rainfalls, hurricanes and disrupted wind and ocean currents. The dramatic consequences are already resulting in uninhabitable areas of the world.

“Although we are at a turning point there is more to do and we are still falling short. Yet the rate of change is pretty impressive,” says Gore.

Solar energy cheaper than fossil fuel
The cost of solar energy is rapidly decreasing and is already below the cost of fossil fuel. In China, 54 percent of new energy comes from solar and wind and in Europe, 77 percent of new generated energy from renewable sources.

Scania has initiated a study that shows that several pathways can be selected to achieve a carbon-free heavy transport system by 2050. These pathways include switching to battery electric vehicles, biofuels, fuel cells or a mix of all these technologies. To succeed, change is needed at a pace never before seen and action must start immediately.

Scania’s President and CEO stated that he was convinced that we can make the transformation to sustainable transport. “We haven’t waited for the politicians, we haven’t even waited for our customers because the two degree global warming increase is not waiting for us. We must work with what we have today – here and now.”

Christiana Figures, who led the negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement, says that prerequisites for initiating these pathways are a compelling vision, stubborn optimism, radical collaboration, contagious leadership and publicised progress.

Shared  public and private responsibility
Making progress is dependent on shared responsibility between public and private sectors. “We should not fall into the trap that business needs to take on the role of government. Having said that, we do need purpose-driven corporations such as Scania, with emphasis on a triple bottom line comprising social, environmental and financial goals.”

At the Sustainable Transport Forum Scania, together with energy provider E.ON, infrastructure provider Siemens and global retailer H&M group, announced that they had formed a coalition to accelerate the decarbonisation of heavy transport. “At the end of the day it’s all about mindset,” says Anna Gedda, Head of Sustainability H&M group. “One year ago, my 6-year old son asked my husband why we were destroying the planet by not using an electric car. In six-seven years’ time he will be a H&M customer and these are the expectations that H&M will have to meet. We don’t only need to make fashion sustainable but to make sustainability fashionable.”

Partnerships can accelerate the movement

Partnerships such as this will be instrumental on the continuing journey towards fossil-free heavy transport. “We have the technology today but need to partner to accelerate the movement,” says Henriksson. “We see that teaming up with our customers and their customers gives results. But we also need to work closely with policy makers to remove hurdles. We cannot do this alone; we need friends, partner and partnership to make 2050 happen.”

LOGISTICS TO TRANSFORM BUSINESSES

28 MARCH 2018

LOTS Group, an independent part of the Scania and Volkswagen Group, is busy empowering companies to set up and operate sustainable and highly-advanced logistics systems.

Lean Optimised Transport Systems (LOTS) says it all. Scania has long worked with Lean principles and now, in its work with LOTS Group, the Lean process has been digitalised. LOTS Group helps to provide information that can transform businesses by contributing insights that can dramatically reduce waste and increase efficiency.

“We are convinced that the transport sector is on the verge of major change,” says Scania President and CEO, Henrik Henriksson. “We want to undergo this change in close collaboration with our customers and their customers to produce better solutions in both transport and logistics. By combining the experience of Scania with haulage companies’ local and sector knowledge, LOTS Group can achieve a more efficient flow of raw materials.”

LOTS logistics: the ultimate ‘helicopter’ view

Magnus Lindholm, Managing Director of LOTS China and Head of Operations at LOTS Group, is standing before a screen showing a satellite image of China. We see small icons in an area on the coast. As he zooms in it becomes clear that I am looking at a port.

“This is where the paper mill is,” says Lindholm, indicating an area coloured yellow on the image, “…and these are the trucks.” The trucks are represented by small arrows to give the viewer a clear understanding of which way they are facing. It is visualised information at its most powerful. By working with LOTS Group, the client, global forestry company is currently identifying bottlenecks in its operations, and doing so in real time.

From a ‘control tower’ typically three screens that display the data and show exactly what is happening to a customer’s fleet at any one time clients can monitor and improve the day-to day-flow of their fleet. LOTS Group can advise on how to improve the flow by not only identifying the weak points but also by recommending possible tailored solutions, such as the best possible trucks for the work.

How it works: Data and transport transparency

“We have a data warehouse, into which goes a great deal of information, such as all the information from our connected trucks, information from our fuel partners, and other key data that supports our optimisation activities,” explains Lindholm.

“Then we use the Lots Transport Management  system to visualise where the trucks are and how much fuel they consume, and where there is waste such as unnecessary waiting times.” LOTS has a central IT team which has developed these tools to best visualise the data.

“You should be able to see and steer your fleet from pretty much anywhere in the world,” says Lindholm.

The statistics are fed into software which allows the customer to drill down further into the numbers and see what is happening year-to-year, month-to-month and day-to-day. Working with the customer, targets can be established and, from a starting point of transparency, LOTS Group can help to reveal where there is waste and inefficiency in the extended logistics chain.

By taking a holistic view, looking to reduce waste and increase efficiency, and through continuous improvements, LOTS Group is supporting customers to truly streamline their flow and discover how to improve their daily operations.

- this article originally appeared on Scania Group website

PLATOONING A STEP CLOSER

One hour west of Stockholm, on a frosty but bright and sunny morning, four articulated trucks pull up onto a disused runway and come to a halt. All the trucks have drivers, but not all the drivers are driving. Today the runway is operating as the test site for Scania’s latest semi-autonomous truck platooning trial.

Scania believes that a sustainable transport future will be a reality through the use of multiple solutions. Platooning is one solution and may be one of the most effective ways to optimise logistics, transport flows and systems.

Up to date innovations

Platooning involves the use of smart technology and the most up to date innovations in autonomous vehicle technology.

Gunnar Tornmalm, Head of Pre-development Automation

On today’s test track, the vehicles drive together in one unbroken line. Each vehicle is, to the casual observer, simply driving one after the other. Gunnar Tornmalm, Head of Pre-development Automation, explains the reality of the situation. The first vehicle, he explains, is the ‘lead’ and the driver is the only driver driving manually. Christoffer Norén, a Development Engineer and one of Tornmalm’s team, sits in the third truck.

Norén is very pleased with the technology: “It was very relaxing giving control to the system,” he says.

Slipstream benefits

The system uses wireless communication so the trucks can follow the leader at a close distance in a safe and efficient manner. All the trucks which follow the lead truck benefit from the slipstream created.

During the test, to further show the robust nature of the system, Tornmalm drives an ‘intruder’ vehicle. This shows how the trucks adjust when a car drives between them. The trucks automatically create a gap into which the vehicle can drive and then when it leaves they automatically make up the gap again. Brake tests are also conducted to show the effective response of the system when the lead vehicle brakes. Once the braking action is communicated to them, the following trucks respond instantaneously.

A step closer to public highways

During the trials the technology proves to be effective. It not only assists the four trucks to operate as one in a steady semi-autonomous platoon, but is also shows that it is ready to tackle unplanned, real-life, interruptions. These tests show how ready the system is for public road testing. Each test takes platooning a step closer to public highways.

“I would like to see pilot tests on a larger scale on public roads in three years,” Tornmalm says.

The continued success of the trials, and the benefits that platooning can bring to logistics, as well as the overall sustainable nature of the system, strongly suggests that Tornmalm may well soon see the system in full operation.

Platooning in brief

Platooning is a method that allows vehicles to travel in close formation on the road thereby increasing road capacity. Scania has been developing the technology for several years and is well positioned at the forefront of autonomous vehicle research and development to take platooning to the next level.

— Reporting for camera (interviews) and written content for Scania.com

THE ALGORITHM AT THE HEART OF AUTONOMOUS TRUCK SAFETY

In their work at the department of Automatic Control, Professor Bo Wahlberg and Ph.D. student Pedro Lima are dedicated to achieving one thing above all else: safety.
If autonomous trucks are going to become part of our everyday lives, they are going to be the safest trucks ever created.

Many accidents we see on the roads today are caused by what is known as 'pilot-induced oscillation', which Professor Wahlberg says “is ultimately due to the fear induced in the driver in a dangerous situation, causing them to overact or overcompensate”.

But a well-designed algorithm doesn’t react like that; it computes what needs to be done and reacts accordingly, causing an autonomous or self-driving vehicle to continue safely on its way. And it’s this that Wahlberg and his team at the Department of Automatic Control are focused on creating. However, working towards such an algorithm hasn’t been easy, and Wahlberg says that it would have been impossible to develop even five years ago.

“We just didn’t have the computational power. The ideas are not completely new, but the ability was not there.”

Doctoral student Pedro Lima agrees: “What we are using is Model Predictive Control (MPC), and that is not a new concept. It actually existed as early as the 1960s, but running a complicated optimisation algorithm this fast wouldn’t have been possible before, without today’s computers.”

Lima is a fervent advocate of automated driving technology. He explains his motivation with a stark statistic.

“This week I attended a conference where I learned that 1.2 million people die every year due to road accidents. That’s like a jumbo jet falling from the sky every half a day,” he says, still genuinely shocked by what he has heard. Despite this disturbing picture he is far from despairing because of the possibilities offered by the project he is working on. “In the future people will look back and say ‘how on earth did people actually drive a car?’ It’s so dangerous,” he says.

Automatic Control and safe transport

The Department of Automatic Control at KTH is a busy place, befitting the fact that automation is one of the hottest research subjects going, and also a much-anticipated technology by consumers and industry alike. Along with his colleague Assistant Professor Jonas Mårtensson, Professor Wahlberg supervises Lima’s research, which focuses specifically on control algorithms of heavy-duty construction trucks, and he has spent the past four years working on Model Predictive Control (MPC).  “Using MPC a truck can stay on a narrow, winding road and drive itself smoothly,” Wahlberg says. 

Lima adds, “The model can predict the vehicle's movements in any given situation, on the basis of information about what direction it's being steered in, how much throttle is given and alternatively how much braking force is applied.”

In the work, a lot of effort has been expended on developing the truck’s control algorithm so that it is as accurate and reliable as possible, but achieving this with a heavy truck is no mean feat. With much greater mass and much more built-in inertia than passenger cars, trucks present a greater challenge for autonomous driving technology. 

When it comes to automated vehicles in general, the question of safety is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, but there is a significant cultural mindset to overcome: many of us are scared to let go of the steering wheel.

However, Wahlberg says that this is all a matter of public perception. Lima’s work notes that figures for 2012 from the USA’s national highway safety administration (NHTSA) showed that 94% of accidents are caused by driver error. Indeed, the World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts that road traffic injuries will be the third greatest cause of disabilities by 2020. Yet, despite those statistics the public are still wary of autonomous vehicles, preferring to have humans in control.

How automated trucks can make mines safer

The project ‘iQMatic’, led by KTH partner Scania AB, has the objective of developing a fully autonomous truck for mining operations by 2018. Pedro Lima spends roughly twenty percent of his time working with Scania at its research and development department in Södertälje, where he is developing the ‘essential controller’.

“The essential controller is a way to automatically control the steering, gas and brakes,” Lima explains. He adds that he likes to focus on the steering most of all, and the Model Predictive Control technology makes it possible to minimise deviations from the driverless vehicle’s intended path. The MPC also maximises passenger comfort by reducing involuntary side-to-side movement in the steering, acceleration and braking, while finally maximising the vehicle's fuel efficiency. The team is focused on ensuring that the automated vehicle drives as smoothly and as safely as possible.

Tests so far have impressed professional drivers. The prototype, ‘Astator’, travelled softly and stably around a track at Scania’s testing area in Södertälje, achieving its maximum speed of 90 km/h. The algorithm smoothes the drive by taking in new information every 50 milliseconds, causing it to make the vehicle steer, accelerate and brake correctly.

The Global Positioning System (GPS), LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing technology that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges) and multiple cameras all make an autonomous truck much more aware of its situation and position than a conventional unautomated truck with an unassisted driver. This awareness, allied to an ability to automatically assess and correct direction, speed and braking ensures that the trucks of the future will be very much safer alternatives to the vehicles currently in use.

By 2018 we are highly likely to see autonomous trucks working in mining environments in what will be highly controlled situations. When automated vehicles are used in mines, it is most likely that people will be placed in separate control towers overseeing the larger picture and giving the vehicle its tasks; that means the risk to people working at an often busy mine would be greatly reduced. This will be a great step forward in increasing the safety of mineworkers.

Though automated vehicle technology is still developing, Bo Wahlberg is already certain about the improvements in safety that it will bring.

“Although we cannot be sure of what the future holds beyond the mines and more controlled environments, we are sure that Model Predictive Control has the ability to bring not only advances in general vehicle autonomy but also in road safety overall.”