Coalition formation and cost sharing for truck platooning

Truck platooning consists of one or several trucks driving very closely behind the platoon leader with the help of technology. Platooning reduces fuel consumption, carbon emissions and congestion while increasing road safety and the productivity of trucks and drivers. This article focuses on the advance planning of platoons. First, we study platoon formation from a system-wide optimization perspective. We formalize the underlying optimization problem and we propose exact and approximate solution approaches that appear to perform very well in instances of practical size. Second, we posit that truck platooning is much more likely to develop efficiently among multiple operators. This involves a shift in business relations between freight operators through cost sharing. We make use of cooperative game theory to study cost allocations among players. Our analysis shows that a compromise is needed among existence, stability and computational efficiency. However, we propose cost allocation rules for cooperative platooning games that perform very well in practice with regard to their stability. Finally, we propose an illustrative example based on the settings of the Port of Rotterdam and we provide a series of insights.