Optimal coordination strategy to form and dissolve truck platoons on a highway stretch

Abstract

© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to The Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering.This paper presents a coordination strategy to optimally form and dissolve N-truck platoons on a highway stretch. Truck platooning, a set of trucks driving with small inter-vehicle distances, can benefit the transportation sector by reducing the overall fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions while increasing traffic throughput. However, different itineraries and delivery time restrictions may limit the opportunities to from platoons on a large scale. Therefore, a coordination strategy must be capable of merging scattered trucks and splitting the platoon considering the constraints from each participant to avoid penalties. To address this issue, an optimization problem is formulated to provide optimal speed profiles for an unlimited number of trucks during the merging, platooning and splitting phases of the coordination. An equivalent single stretch representation is presented to simplify complex road networks using appropriate merging and splitting constraints. The resulting optimal speed profiles are presented for 2, 3 and 10 trucks highlighting the capability to handle different desired traveling speeds without compromising the itinerary of each truck and allowing the overtake of trucks directly in the optimization problem. Sensitivity analyses are used to investigate the savings potential according to the main parameters of the coordination. Finally, the proposed algorithm is evaluated in a simulation study using validated vehicle and consumption models with real road topography data. In a 100 km Brazilian highway stretch, scenarios with two and three scattered trucks with substantial initial separation distances are evaluated and present energy efficient maneuvers under the proposed coordination strategy.