When is it Fuel Efficient for a Heavy Duty Vehicle to Catch Up With a Platoon?

Abstract

Vehicle platooning has in recent years become an important research field for the vehicle industry. By establishing a platoon of heavy duty vehicles, the fuel consumption can be reduced for the follower vehicles due to the slipstream effect. However, as vehicles are scattered on the road driving by themselves, coordination amongst the vehicles is required. In this paper we study the problem of when it is beneficial for a heavy duty vehicle to drive faster in order to catch up and join a platoon. We derive a formula, based on flat road and with no vehicle accelerations, to calculate if it is more fuel-efficient for a vehicle to drive faster and platoon or keep driving alone. Depending on the distance between the vehicles and the distance to the destination, the fuel savings vary. For a trip of 350 km, with a distance of 10 km to the vehicle ahead, the fuel saving could be up to 7 % if the follower vehicle decides to increase the speed from 80 km/h to 90 km/h in order to catch up and form a platoon, assuming an air drag reduction of 32 % when platooning. Sensitivity analysis has shown that the speeds need to be relatively accurate in order to not give any false positive catch up decisions.

Occluded Street Objects Perception Algorithm of Intelligent Vehicles Based on 3D Projection Model

“…The idea of V2V in our paper is similar to the truck platoons [3][4][5]. The difference is that the truck platoon link trucks or cars in train-like line which can save fuel, fit more cars on road, and potentially improve safety.…”

“…The delay caused by transmission will be lower than 100ms for per frame image. And the effect under 100ms can be ignored in perception systems, which is proved in experiments in [3]. If no objects were detected, vehicle B will stop sending videos and will send stop signal to A, which will terminate the communication between A and B.…”

Coordinated route optimization for heavy-duty vehicle platoons

“…We consider our work to be closely related to [24], which addresses the interesting case of two HDVs that are traveling in the same direction on the same road, but are some distance apart. In this case, it might benefit the trailing HDV to speed up (temporarily using more fuel) in order to catch a leading vehicle and start saving fuel from platooning.…”

Distributed graph-based control of convoys of heterogeneous vehicles using curvilinear road coordinates

“…Different works have shown that when multiple vehicles drive within a spatially coordinated scheme such as convoys or platoons, safety can be increased [1], and fuel consumption reduced [2], [3].…”