Large amount of diesel engine waste heats make researchers design systems that utilize the engine waste heat to provide the cooling demand of the heavy-duty vehicles and improve the engine efficiency. Considerable advantages of adsorption cooling system lead to be nominated for this purpose. Coolant and exhaust gases are the main sources of waste heats of diesel engines and using each of them to drive the adsorption cooling system requires its own equipment and working pair. In this paper, a detailed numerical model has been developed and to examine the performance of the cooling system driven by the coolant waste heat with working pair of silica gel-water and also driven by exhaust waste heat with zeolite13x-water working pair. An identical absorbent bed and ambient conditions have been employed to compare the performance of both systems to identify the more appropriate system. The results show that exhaust driven adsorption cooling system has more capability to meet the vehicle cooling demand. Moreover, the performance of the both adsorption cooling systems were examined under variable ambient condition. Results indicate that increase in ambient temperature leads to almost a linear performance drop in both systems that is more considerable in the coolant- driven adsorption system.