MODELING ADOPTION OF AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE TECHNOLOGIES BY FREIGHT ORGANIZATIONS

Over the last few years, a rapid explosion of new technologies has created opportunities to address critical freight transportation challenges in urban, suburban, and rural areas. These innovations include truck platooning, smart parking systems, collaborative and shared logistics techniques, and connected autonomous vehicles. These new technologies are influencing consumer behavior and reshaping freight supply chain management at the urban, regional, and international level. In order to understand how these innovations are changing the field of freight transportation, it is essential to understand how organizations choose to adopt innovations. Adoption methods available from consumer behavior research are mostly based on individuals, and there is limited material on the behavior of organizations in regards to innovation adoption. The general adoption methods cannot be directly used in modeling adoption of innovations by organizations without further study and modifications.
Approaches to innovation adoption can be broken into two sections: theoretical and methodological approaches. The theoretical approaches attempt to identify the forces that cause an organization to accept or reject an innovation. Once the forces have been identified, the theoretical approaches explain how the forces interact and influence the adoption process. Methodological approaches are composed of modeling techniques which can be applied to innovations in order to generate predictions of adoption patterns. By identifying the benefits and drawbacks of each approach, it is possible to select the most appropriate theoretical and methodological approach for organizational adoption.