Fuel consumption assessment in delivery tours to develop eco driving behaviour

A report of the European Commission in 1998 identified various areas that can be explored to achieve a sustainable logistics. Among those areas, we discuss the reduction of fuel consumption by an eco-driving strategy. Eco-driving is often cited as a good practice to reduce fuel consumption and claim a potential of - 10% to - 20% of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Freight transportation by truck is one of the major contributors to CO2 emissions (14% of the grand total in France). However, assessing its potential in actual operations is not an easy task and to our best knowledge has never been done before on a comprehensive scale. There were no researches that were able to prove the efficiency of eco-driving in an operational freight transport context. To complement other researches that aim to bring a theoretical analysis to the link between the consumption and its impacting factors, this research is anchored in practice. Firstly it measures consumption on real situations. About 9000 tours were followed and analyzed. Secondly the significant fuel consumption factors are analysed. Third the importance of driving behaviour as one of the most important factors for reducing consumption is assessed. In this research, done in collaboration with a logistics services provider operating its own trucks fleet, we defined a measurement protocol implemented in 29 trucks. Then we were able to retain the fuel consumption and to link it to the context of the tour. Several incentives were tested to motivate truck drivers in order to reduce fuel consumption. This raises the question of the individual measurement and the evaluation of the driving behaviour improvement. In classical eco-driving models, the estimation of the eco-driving fuel consumption depending on the tour environment was often overlooked because of the complexity of the task. However it is required to build a new sustainable incentive system. The main contribution of this paper is to identify and to propose a new system that allows logistics service provider to evaluate driving behaviours and to share the eco driving individual gain as a new driver incentive method. As a result we propose a non linear model to estimate an interval of eco-driving consumption depending on tour environment factors like truck type, road type, speed, load and weather. By reporting the eco-driving strategy implemented in 3 different operational areas during 2 years, this research has enabled us to understand the benefits of the actions to reach fuel consumption and emissions reduction up to 4,2%. It shows here that eco driving strategy can be very efficient in an operational freight transportation environment. In this contribution we developed a first assessment of driving behaviour depending on the conditions of every tour. Thus this paper opens research opportunities in two directions; the first is the experimentation of this approach in different context. The second direction is the enhancement of the model to gain in precision or in robustness.