Author: EUCAR June 30, 2020 Share this:

The ENSEMBLE project is paving the way for the adoption of multi-brand truck platooning in Europe. This ambitious objective will help improving fuel economy, CO2 emissions, traffic safety and efficiency throughout the road freight sector.

To achieve its objective, ENSEMBLE is increasing safe platooning when using different branded  trucks  and carrying out impact assessment for infrastructure, safety and traffic flow. Traffic and road authorities have been approached to jointly define road approval requirements. Platoon Operation Levels were defined to guide the design of different platooning functionalities and strategies, reflecting the full diversity of trucks  with platooning functionality.

ENSEMBLE is focused on aligning and developing European standards, centring its activities on the harmonisation of multi-brand specifications and with the aim of creating a multi-brand V2V communication protocol.

The project started in June 2018. Within its first year, ENSEMBLE concentrated on bundling the requirements and development of a reference design. This reference design is currently being taken up by the OEMs and suppliers for implementation on their own trucks. During the second half of 2020 and 2021 the project will focus on testing the multi-brand platoons on test tracks and international public roads. The technical results will be evaluated and combined with the initial requirements. Also, the impact on fuel consumption, drivers and other road users will be established. The deliverables for requirements and use cases are already available at the project website (www.platooningensemble.eu/library/deliverables).

ENSEMBLE consortium includes all six European truck manufacturers: DAF, DAIMLER, IVECO, MAN, SCANIA and VOLVO. They will bring in their fore-running technological position on platooning.  The consortium is completed with suppliers (CLEPA, NXP, ZF, WABCO, Bosch, Continental) to support the OEM implementations, and by research partners (TNO, IDIADA, UGE, KTH and VU Brussel). ERTICO supports the project by involving relevant stakeholders. This project is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 769115.

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