Personal transportation as we know it is being reimagined thanks to the introduction of autonomous electric vehicles. With autonomous vehicles (AV) on the rise, especially for Transportation Network Companies (TNC), it is expected that the experience inside of the vehicle cabin will be tailored engineered for riders, not drivers. As a result, customer-facing attributes such as noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) will need to be considered with a new perspective. Of the many challenges in developing NVH performance of an AV, road noise and component noise have, and continue, to require the most amount of development and refinement effort. It is well known that a critical component in the chain from the tire-road interface to the occupant’s ears is the tire-wheel assembly and, therefore, allocating targets for this subsystem is essential. When in motion, the tire-wheel system possesses complex structural-acoustic properties like centrifugal, gyroscopic, fluid-structure coupling, pre-load effects, and excitation that may be described by random enforced motion at the tire contact patch and road interface. Component targets are derived by experimental and virtual methods, enabling simulation-driven product development. For tire testing and development, experimental methods are often limited by the availability of complex and expensive test infrastructure. An alternative approach is explored in order to develop tire-wheel subsystem targets using experimental tests and virtual methods applying transmissibility theory with multiple degrees of freedom based on frequency response functions derived at free-free boundary conditions.

The transition from internal combustion engines to electric propulsion for road-cargo systems is on-going and faces multiple challenges for the involved actors and affected stakeholders. The product development of, for example, future battery electric heavy trucks for long distance hauling requires new perspectives on concept evaluation and selection due to high data uncertainty. These new perspectives are needed to satisfy the business objectives of both OEMs and transport providers, while also fulfilling an overall set of requirements, including environment-related ones. From a society point of view, public investments in electric power generation and distribution grids will be needed as use of electric energy will increase. These public investments need to be balanced and prioritized with other expenses. The investments in new technology in terms of battery electric haulers made by the transport providers need to be profitable and competitive with respect to utilization rate and cargo transport efficiency. The time duration of the mentioned activities is significantly different, which adds more complexity. The complexity of the road cargo system as a whole can be modelled as a system-of-systems, as the constituent systems like truck, transport and energy providers as well as energy and road infrastructure are independent managerially and/or operationally systems themselves. This paper describes the state and outlook of the conceptual modelling of key components in a general road cargo system of systems framework.