Freight transportation is of outmost importance for the development of our society and economy. At the same time, transporting goods on roads accounts for a significant amount of all energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this influence, road transportation is mainly done today by individual long-haulage trucks with no real-time coordination or global optimization. In this lecture, we will discuss how modern information and communication technology supports a cyber-physical transportation system architecture with an integrated logistic system coordinating fleets of trucks traveling together in vehicle platoons. From the reduced air drag, platooning trucks traveling close together can save more than 10% of their fuel consumption. Control and estimation challenges and solutions on various level of this transportation system will be presented. It will be argued that a system architecture utilizing vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication enables safe and optimal control of individual trucks as well as optimized vehicle fleet collaborations. Empirical evidence will be presented for why large-scale fleet coordination is mainly a scheduling (not a routing) problem. Incentives for cooperation and pricing of transport services will also be discussed. Several experiments done on European highways will illustrate achievable system performance and potential obstacles to be over
