Transport is a critical factor in modern pork production and can seriously affect swine welfare. While previous research has explored thermal conditions during transport, the impact of extreme weather conditions on the trailer thermal environment under industry practices has not been well documented; and the critical factors impacting microclimate are not well understood. To assess the trailer ...

This paper is a survey about of the Truck and Trailer Routing Problem. The Truck and Trailer Routing Problem is an extension of the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem. Defined recently, this problem consists in designing the optimal set of routes for fleet of vehicles (trucks and trailers) in order to serve a given set of geographically dispersed customers. Since TTRP itself is a very difficult...

The semi-trailer chassis was usually treated as rigid body in many existing literature, which would lead to larger deviation from actual situation. A rigid semi-trailer chassis model was built and flexiblized based on the modal test results in this paper. The tractor semi-trailer with flexible chassis was utilized to simulate the rollover scenarios on high speed obstacle avoidance under emergen...

Milk collection is a problem which is well known in rural areas all around the world. This paper considers a real world problem for a Norwegian dairy company collecting raw milk from farmers. Chao (2002) and Scheuerer (2006) describe the Truck and Trailer Routing Problem (TTRP) as a variant of the traditional Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). In this problem customers are divided into vehicle cust...

In this research we investigate condition numbers obtained from least squares estimation for a car-trailer system to characterize estimation performance. In this case, we can select better parameter estimation methods or well-posed measured data sets for the car-trailer system using condition numbers. We calculate condition numbers from several different linear model-based least squares methods...

Trailer reversing is a problem frequently considered in the literature, usually with fairly complex non-linear control theory based approaches. In this paper, we overview our simple method for stabilizing a tractor-trailer system to a trajectory based on the notion of controlling the hitch-angle of the trailer rather than the steering angle of the tractor. The performance of this control method...

In this paper, an algorithm for a dynamic base real-time kinematic (DRTK) GPS is presented and a novel application to the guidance and control of a mobile robot pulling a trailer is discussed. The DRTK system is used to estimate the relative position between the robot and trailer in the autonomous system described, and the results are compared to traditional methods utilizing an optical encoder...

Articulation angle sensing is an essential component of manoeuvrability and stability control systems for articulated heavy goods vehicles, particularly long combination vehicles. Existing solutions to this task are limited by reliance on trailer modifications or information measurement accuracy, both, restricting commercial adoption. In paper we present a purely tractor-based sensor concept co...

This contribution gives an introduction to an integrated vehicle routing and resource allocation problem. We refer to it as the Swap Trailer Problem and formulate the mathematical model. After the analysis of dynamic decision problems and the development of a framework for this problem, we highlight the dynamic aspect of the problem. Two different solution strategies are supposed. Special prope...

During warm weather, incorrect bedding levels on a trailer transporting market weight pigs may result in heat stress, fatigue, and death. Two experiments were conducted in June and July of 2011; Experiment 1 used 80 loads (n = 13,887 pigs) to determine the effects of two bedding levels (3 (68.1 kg) or 6 bags (136.2 kg) of wood shavings/trailer [each bag contained 22.7 kg, 0.2 m³]) on pig measur...