Designing a Back-Office System for Platooning

Abstract

Platooning is a term used to describe trucks that drive close behind one another to reduce fuel consumption by making use of the reduced air drag. Moreover, in order to be able to do so effectively a number of technologies need to be fully functioning. It is also not a new subject, and has been researched extensively with the hope of applying the technology on public roads in the future. Although, despite the technologies possibilities it is still unexplored in certain areas one of them being the so called "back-office system" responsible of managing platooning. Compared to other systems, there are several requirements that a Back-Office system for platooning needs to be able to fulfill. For this reason, the aim of the study is to explore the required functions as well as what is going to be required of the user for managing a Back-Office as well as what future design challenges are. Furthermore, the outcome of this study is a set of requirements of functions required of a future Back-Office system, a suggestion of possible end-users and a list of future design challenges. These were found by utilizing a set of methods within the designthinking methodology while also creating a low and high fidelity prototype of a Back-Office system.