Cutting fuel consumption of truckload carriers by using new enhanced refueling policies

This study proposes a new fuel-saving approach for the U.S. truckload (TL) industry from the operations-research perspective. Our approach is inspired by the idea given by multiple industry experts that, when trucks are heavy, their fuel consumption rates are notably worse in uphill and congested segments than in other segments, so that trucks should avoid buying large amounts of fuel before entering uphill and/or congested segments. We show both theoretically and numerically that our approach requires lower fuel consumption than other (existing) approaches to move a truck in a given (fixed) origin-destination route. Although, at a glance, the savings given by the proposed approach might seem small, it may actually save noticeable amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and fuel cost for the U.S. TL industry, if implemented properly.