UC Davis

Worldwide, authorities advocate for cleaner vehicles technologies as alternatives to mitigate the negative impacts of freight transportation, including noise, emissions, and traffic congestion. To foster these technologies, authorities have enacted sustainability programs/policies to either promote their use or to discourage the use of internal combustion vehicles. Nevertheless, due to the novelty and developmental immaturity of most of these technologies, we are far from fully understand their potential benefits, challenges, and unintended consequences of their adoption. In addition, due to the inherent complexity of logistics operations, it is difficult to anticipate the direct financial and operational impacts that sustainability policies would have on businesses. For instance, policies that seek to increase the proportion of cleaner vehicles in fleets. To advance the theory on these, firstly, this work carries out an extensive analysis of the state-of- practice of such innovations. Second, it proposes a series of decision-making systems to better understand the relationships between infrastructure, technological capabilities, and sustainability policies to support the cost-and-environmental-efficient adoption of cleaner freight transportation systems while avoiding financial disruption to private companies. Third, it evaluates collaborative fleet sharing practices as an alternative to taking advantage of cleaner vehicles. The results reveal the trade-off among capital investments in cleaner vehicles and logistics costs, charging stations coverage levels, and vehicles autonomy required to abide by the requirements of the mentioned regulatory policies. In addition, the results glimpse potential economic and environmental benefits of sharing fleets between companies.