Picture 1: Screenshot of the "Truck Overtaking Analyzer GUI"

Truck overtaking maneuvers on the freeway are often perceived as dangerous elephant races. The aim of this tool is to show how truck overtaking maneuvers can be executed safer and more efficiently for all parties involved through cooperation. For this purpose two points are examined in particular:

• Where does the overtaking maneuver start
• How to adjust the velocities

The road and the trucks involved (trucks A and B) can be parameterized via the GUI. Various scenarios are then played through:

• Truck A does not overtake (no cooperation)
• Truck A overtakes at the first opportunity (no cooperation)
• Truck A overhauled as soon as it conforms to StVO (no cooperation)
• Truck A searches for the best time to overtake (passive cooperation)
• Truck A and Truck B search for the best time to overtake and actively adjust their velocity (active cooperation)

The tool provides the costs for each of these scenarios and thus makes it possible to demonstrate the advantages of cooperative truck overtaking maneuvers in monetary terms.

The "Truck Overtaking Spot Analyzer" tool is composed of three files.

To start the tool run the OvertakingSpotAnalyzerGUI.py script.

All the code was tested with Python 3.7, newer versions should also work. The code was tested for compliance with Windows machines. Use the provided requirements.txt in the root directory of this repository, in order to install all required modules. pip3 install -r /path/to/requirements.txt. The GUI is a Tkinter Application which comes pre-installed with python.

The first step is to define the height profile of the road segment. The corresponding GUI elements are in the blue rectangle of Animation 1. You can either select a predefined road from the drop down menu or use the sliders. The road-profile and the resulting slope is displayed in the top plot (orange rectangle).

Animation 1: Adjust the road profile

The next step is to parametrize Truck A and Truck B. Each truck has a starting point on the road, a vehicle mass, a set-velocity and positive and negative hysteresis. The corresponding GUI elements are in the blue rectangle of Animation 2. The resulting velocity profiles are displayed in the second plot (orange rectangle).

Animation 2: Adjust the truck settings

The tool is constantly updating the truck overtaking spot analysis and plots the new results. This can be stopped by deselecting the "Update" checkbox. Further the "Stepsize" can be vary between calculation speed and accuracy. The required calculation time is displayed right next to "stepsize" slider

The "Passive Cooperation" and "Active Cooperation" plots show the required duration and time/fuel-differences for each possible starting point of the overtaking maneuver. Within the gray area an overtaking maneuver is not possible, because Truck A has not reach B yet, or because the overtaking maneuver can not be finished before the road ends. The corresponding velocity profiles of each scenario von be visualized with the checkboxes on the left. The best possible costs for each scenario is displayed in the bottom plot. With the checkboxes you can either select the absolute "Abs" or relative "Rel" costs view.

This project is licensed under the LGPL License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

[1] J.C. Mertens et al., “Cooperative Truck Overtaking on Freeways,” in 2020 Fifteenth International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER), 2020.

Contact: Jan Cedric Mertens.

If you find our work useful in your research, please consider citing:

@inproceedings{mertens2020a,
  title = {Cooperative Truck Overtaking on Freeways},
  booktitle = {2020 Fifteenth International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER)},
  author = {Mertens, Jan Cedric; Jahn, Lennard; Hauenstein, Jürgen; Diermeyer, Frank; Kraus, Sven},
  year = {2020}
}