Review of The Future of Automated Freight Transport: Concepts, Design, and Implementation by Rob Konings, Hugo Priemus, and Peter Nijkamp: Edward Elgar, Northampton, Mass.; 2005; 324 pp.

This is a book of ideas! However, I would disagree with the word “future” in the title as it is more aptly titled Concepts, Design, and Implementation for Automated Freight Transport. This is so because the book focuses on potential innovations using varying degrees of automation, some of which will never reach the implementation stage and others like underground capsule pipeline systems that have been around for many years, but have not been widely used.

The book is organized into three sections that give a comprehensive review of (1) “Concepts and Perspectives in Automated Freight Transport”; (2) “Related Design and Evaluation Tools”; and (3) “Implementation Issues.” The book is comprised of a set of papers written by researchers from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, and derived from work performed in the research program, Freight Transportation Automation and Multimodality (FTAM). Beginning with a presentation of the latest developments in automated freight transport and future visions for the different inland surface freight transportation modes (road, rail, pipeline, and inland shipping), the book identifies tools and strategies for designing and evaluating these systems. Lastly, it addresses implementation issues that include institutional, financial, safety, and integration barriers.

This book can be a valuable reference for researchers and policy makers for assessing ideas proposed for the automation of freight transportation systems. In Part I, research, development and testing activities in support of automated surface transportation modes and systems are described in terms of modal automation and/or developing solutions to location specific problems. Technologies illustrated in detail include automated road transport projects, self-propelled rail freight wagons, automated inland navigation, underground freight transportation, road–rail hybrid transport, and automated vehicle control. The final two chapters of Part I focus on control and infrastructure. Here, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-road communication, in terms of platoon-driving concepts for controlling truck traffic, are described using simulation. Then, the section concludes by looking at the major infrastructure requirements to facilitate and control the flow of automatically controlled trucks (ACTs) on existing roadways. Major issues of concern here are the effect of dedicating a lane of an existing roadway to trucks and other vehicles and infrastructure requirements required to accommodate ACTs and manually driven vehicles (MDVs) at on/off ramps.

Part II is focused on design and evaluation tools for automated freight transport, but there are examples of optimization, simulation, and cost evaluations in some of the earlier chapters that deal with explicit technologies. In Chapter 9, recent developments in simulation are demonstrated in an application to the Underground Logistic System Schiphol, which is an underground system proposed for congestion-free transport of the expensive time-critical air cargo that connects three geographical areas. In Chapter 10 software systems (multiagent systems) that represent different organizations as autonomous decision-making entities, called agents are addressed. The hypothesis here is that in order to support complex transportation processes the interacting agents must be equipped with intelligent capabilities to develop multimodal transportation plans (intra-organizational), and they must analyze events that impact normal operations (incident management). This section ends with adapting a benefit-cost evaluation framework for automated freight systems to show a straightforward evaluation of these complex systems.

Part III of the book looks directly at implementation issues that include financing and deployment, safety, the integration of manned and freight transport, and the role of government in introducing automated freight systems. This section qualifies the barriers confronting large-scale applications of AFT technology ranging from technical to institutional issues and concludes that semiautomated driver assistance systems are more likely to be used on public infrastructure than fully automated systems.

Because this book is a collection of individually authored contributions, there is some overlap in content, but, if used as a reference regarding the concepts relevant to the evolution of Automated Freight Transportation systems, it provides an important contribution to the literature in logistics and freight transport systems.