Heavy-Duty Vehicle Platoon Formation for Fuel Efficiency

Heavy-duty vehicles driving close behind each other, also known as platooning, experience a reduced aerodynamic drag, which reduces the overall fuel consumption up to 20% for the trailing vehicle. However, due to each vehicle being assigned with different transport missions (with different origins, destinations, and delivery times), platoons should be formed, split, and merged along the highways, and vehicles have to drive solo sometimes. In this paper, we study how two or more scattered vehicles can cooperate to form platoons in a fuel-efficient manner. We show that when forming platoons on the fly on the same route and not considering rerouting, the road topography has a negligible effect on the coordination decision. With this, we then formulate an optimization problem when coordinating two vehicles to form a platoon. We propose a coordination algorithm to form platoons of several vehicles that coordinates neighboring vehicles pairwise. Through a simulation study with detailed vehicle models and real road topography, it is shown that our approach yields significant fuel savings.