Studies performed in Canada, Australia, USA and in Europe have shown that long combination vehicles (LCVs), with two or more trailers can significantly reduce road congestion, improve safety, improve transportation cost efficiency, reduce fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions and significantly reduce road surface wear. Unfortunately three major practical barriers prevent adoption of LCVs in the UK: (i) poor manoeuvrability; (ii) poor high speed stability; and (iii) poor reversibility.(i) Many of the roundabouts and narrow roads in the UK's freight transportation network would be impossible for conventional LCVs to negotiate. One way to improve the low speed manoeuvrability of an LCV would be to steer the trailer and/or tractor drive axles. Simple 'passive' steering systems have been developed for rigid trucks and tractor/semi-trailers. Such systems set the road wheel steer angles in a fixed relationship to the geometry of the vehicle: the angles do not change with speed. Recent studies have shown that passive steering systems substantially improve the low-speed manoeuvrability of tractor/semi-trailer combinations by reducing cut-in. They also significantly reduce lateral tyre forces / leading to lower tyre wear and reduced road surface damage. This is important for transporting goods in urban areas where vehicles need to negotiate sharp corners and small diameter roundabouts, at low speeds.(ii) High speed stability is also a problem for many conventional LCVs since lateral accelerations are amplified with each successive trailer. This can lead to premature roll-over during evasive manoeuvres. While passive steering would improve the low speed manoeuvrability of LCVs, the applicants have recently shown that such systems reduce high-speed yaw stability, increase rearward amplification and degrade handling. Consequently fitting a passive steering system to an LCV is likely to further degrade its already poor high-speed stability. To overcome these problems at high speeds an active steering system could be used instead of passive steering. In an active system the steering relationship is varied while the vehicle is in motion to achieve optimal performance at all speeds. While such systems have yet to be developed for heavy vehicles, they have been successfully employed on cars and SUV's: eg Delphi's 'Quadrasteer' system fitted to GMC SUV's. Quadrasteer increases manoeuvrability at low speeds and improves handling and stability at high speeds. Similar benefits could be gained by using active steering on HGVs in general and LCVs in particular.(iii) Finally, the poor reversibility of conventional LCVs would severely restrict the use of existing freight terminals and loading dock infrastructure in the UK. However active steering could be designed to assist drivers to reverse complex multi-unit vehicles. Preliminary research by the applicants has shown that active steering can improve the reversibility of tractor/full trailer combinations, however, algorithms to suit other vehicle combinations, such as tractor/semi-trailers and LCVs, still need to be developed.The main research challenges to be addressed in this project are therefore to develop active steering technologies for LCVs. Once prototype technologies have been developed and tested it will be possible to assess the costs and benefits of implementing active-steering on LCVs in the UK.The research will build on previous work on active steering systems for lorries performed in Cambridge University Engineering Department. It will involve theoretical control system development; field testing of control concepts using existing experimental heavy goods vehicle units; prototype actuator hardware development and laboratory testing; and a detailed cost/benefit analysis. The research will be performed by two postdoctoral researchers in the university, working in collaboration with engineers from a consortium of companies in the heavy vehicle industry.

This programme brings together teams from Herriot Watt University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Westminster and Durham University: providing a multidisciplinary focus on the research needed to enable and underpin radical measures to decarbonise the UK's road freight transport sector. The researchers are augmented by a consortium of 22 industrial partners, drawn from users, suppliers and participants in the road logistics sector. These industrial members provide advice and guidance as well as a rapid route to prototyping and implementation of solutions. The first 5-year programme, conducted by the same team, laid the foundations and showed that radical measures are necessary to hit the UK Government's CO2 reduction targets. It also showed that integration between logistics solutions, vehicle technology, and policy measures is essential. This experience has shaped the design of the proposed programme. The new research programme will run for 5 years and has three themes: (i) data collection and management, (ii) logistics systems, and (iii) vehicle technology. A portfolio of 23 projects spans the themes. The first strand of projects (funded mainly by EPSRC), will focus on reducing barriers to promising strategic, deep decarbonisation technologies and solutions. These projects will create and integrate new data, new modelling tools and decision support systems, to create new insights about technological and logistical solutions, compelling arguments for their early adoption and recommendations for the necessary policy measures. Driven by a desire to model and then quantify the benefits of radical logistics options, the models will be developed and validated with data from real freight operations by the industrial partners, collected by novel automated means. Alternative vehicle fuels and power trains and ways of significantly reducing energy consumption will be investigated. The second strand of projects (funded mainly by EPSRC and industry) will focus on extending and optimising the capabilities of promising technologies and on increasing their impact when applied to decarbonisation of road freight. Applied research into the dynamics of logistics mode decisions and testing of novel logistics options such as horizontal collaboration, co-loading and reorganisation of logistics infrastructure, will be enabled by tools developed in the first strand. Technologies developed in the first 5 years of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight (SRF) will be tested in two separate full-scale field trials with consortium partners, funded by InnovateUK. Road-mapping will provide a mechanism for corporates, government departments and researchers to build a common view of the future. The projects in the third strand (funded by Energy Technologies Institute) will focus on implementation of tools and practices that offer immediate impact. These include novel and powerful software systems for industry to use in data collection and for vehicle characterisation and fleet decarbonisation. Research into the drivers of strategy and policy will, likewise identify the most powerful ways to influence adoption of technologies and logistics solutions. The Road Freight Systems Living Laboratory ('Living Lab') is the central integrating element of the SRF's five-year research programme. Almost every project in the Centre will be part of it. The Living Lab will provide a test bed to measure and model freight operations; to develop technical and logistical interventions based on real-time logistics data; to test the interventions in simulation; to develop decision support tools (several based on work done in the first 5 years of the SRF) and eventually to implement and trial the tools and systems in practice. The Living Lab will be based on an integrated software and data platform that is currently being built by the research team and industry partners.

Like energy and automotive before it, UK freight transport is now on the cusp of a socio-technical transition away from fossil fuel dependency. This transition will require major investment to fleet and infrastructure, cause disruption to assets and business models, and will trigger significant reconfiguration. Whilst the scaling up of fossil phase-out is most likely to occur from the 2030s onwards, the next 10 years of investments are critical to enabling the transition, and to mitigating transition risks to the "hard to abate" freight sectors, and by association UK trade. Our concept to address this challenge is for a Network of broad but interconnected academic excellence integrated with key and leading stakeholders in freight decarbonisation, that collaboratively develops and applies knowledge and understanding of rapid freight decarbonisation. We will use this Network to collect and distil current knowledge, as well as to identify and de-risk the key remaining research challenges that can unleash significant freight-decarbonisation targeted investment and guide enabling policy. This Network connects five freight transport investments made by the EPSRC with a track record of a whole systems approach to decarbonisation of UK freight flows (international and national), and of closely integrating and embedding research with industry and policy makers alike. The Network's efforts will be guided by a number of features of UK freight transport including: (i) significant fixed infrastructure with long timescales for investment (ii) lack of consensus on the specific technological solutions for each mode (iii) a complex combination of national and international transport systems (iv) besides the road and rail network, a limited scope for public sector investment (v) Complex governance involving a mix of UK, EU and international (UN) regulation. The Network will align and integrate directly with UK government and existing initiatives including (i) Industrial strategy (ii) Clean Growth Strategy (iii) Road to zero (iv) Clean Maritime Council (v) UN agency fora (vi) World Bank's Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (vii) ongoing work on aligning investment to decarbonisation with: European Investment Bank, UK private sector institutions, IFC and IMF, and leading investment NGOs: 2 degrees investing, World Economic Forum, Global Maritime Forum, Global Shippers Forum, UK FTA. To achieve this Network's objective of unleashing significant investment for freight decarbonisation, it is organised into five multi-modal and cross-cutting thematic areas and executed through a three-step approach: Theme 1: Role of data and models for unlocking implementation decision making Theme 2: Managing macroeconomic, policy and technology uncertainty, whilst mitigating climate risk in investment decisions Theme 3: Fuel and propulsion technology pathways Theme 4: Aligning drivers for decarbonisation investment/policy with local (inc. air pollution), UK, EU and Global climate policy and integrating into private sector decision making Theme 5. Coupling the evolution of logistics with decarbonizing freight Step 1: Refinement of current knowledge and perspectives into a focused set of research questions covering each of the five themes Step 2: Commissioning of a series (~13) small projects which can develop further understanding of these questions and the methods suitable for addressing them Step 3: Distillation of the Network's knowledge, in combination with the outputs of the small projects, to produce a strategy to drive freight decarbonisation investment, and an agenda and plan describing a series of further collaboration and funding activity that can sustain the Network