Ad-hoc platoon formation and dissolution strategies for multi-lane highways

Vehicle platooning, a coordinated and controlled vehicle-following strategy, addresses the issue of high fuel consumption of heavy-duty vehicles. This research considers platoons that are formed on the fly in an ad-hoc manner. We investigate two types of ad-hoc platoon formation and corresponding platoon dissolution strategies. The first approach forms a platoon greedily without considering the order of destinations of the platoon members. This approach enables a quick formation but imposes an overhead of platoon rebuilding, and consequently, additional fuel cost when platoon members leave. An alternative approach forms a platoon in the order of the destinations of its platoon members. This ordered approach incurs a comparatively higher formation time due to vehicles’ reorganization but does not lead to further overhead of platoon rebuilding. We investigate whether these ad-hoc formation and dissolution strategies can preserve the original fuel benefit of platooning, and which of the two ad-hoc formation strategies are more fuel-efficient. The experimental results show that the greedy formation of the platoon is more fuel-efficient for a multi-lane highway. The proposed prediction model provides 90.4% prediction accuracy for the greedy approach and 82.2% prediction accuracy for the ordered approach on average, for platoon sizes from two to six vehicles.