An Energy-efficient and Trust-based Formation Algorithm for Cooperative Vehicle Platooning

Platooning has been identified as a promising vehicular traffic management strategy to improve energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, road capacity, and on-road safety in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In this vehicular platooning system, a platoon leader (PL) vehicle provides autonomous driving service to its platoon members (PMs). However, some badly behaved platoon leaders may put the platoon in danger, which makes it crucial for platoon members to distinguish and avoid them. In this paper, we propose a trust-based PL evaluation mechanism, in which the data management center uses the feedback collected from trusted platoon members to compute the evaluation scores of platoon leaders, to help the platoon members choose reliable PLs. Based on this, a two-stage platoon formation algorithm is proposed, which comprehensively considers the PLs' benefits and PMs' service needs to form a stable and energy-efficient vehicle platooning. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only significantly reduces the energy consumption by maintaining platoon stability, but also excludes the untruthful feedback.