A Predictive Framework for Dynamic Heavy-Duty Vehicle Platoon Coordination

This article describes a system to facilitate dynamic en route formation of heavy-duty vehicle platoons with the goal of reducing fuel consumption. Safe vehicle platooning is a maturing technology that leverages modern sensor, control, and communication technology to automatically regulate the inter-vehicle distances. Truck platooning has been shown to reduce fuel consumption through slipstreaming by up to 10%; under realistic highway-driving conditions. To further benefit from this technology, a platoon coordinator is proposed, which interfaces with fleet management systems and suggests how platoons can be formed in a fuel-efficient manner over a large region. The coordinator frequently updates the plans to react to newly available information. This way, it requires a minimum of customization with respect to the logistic operations. We discuss the system architecture in detail and introduce important underlying methodological foundations. Plans are derived in computationally tractable stages optimizing fuel savings from platooning. The effectiveness of this approach is verified in a simulation study. It shows that the coordinated platooning system can improve over spontaneously occurring platooning even under the presence of disturbances. A real demonstrator has also been developed. We present data from an experiment in which three vehicles were coordinated to form a platoon on public highways under normal traffic conditions. It demonstrates the feasibility of coordinated en route platoon formation with current communication and on-board technology. Simulations and experiments support that the proposed system is technically feasible and a potential solution to the problem of using vehicle platooning in an operational context.