A conceptualization of vehicle platoons and platoon operations

Abstract

Vehicle platooning, a coordinated movement strategy, has been proposed to address a range of current transport challenges such as traffic congestion, road safety, energy consumption and pollution. But in order to form platoons in an ad-hoc manner the vehicles have to ‘speak the same language’, which is in current practice limited to vehicles of particular manufacturers. There is no standard language yet. Also in research, while the current literature focuses on platoon control strategies, intra-platoon communication, or platooning impacts on traffic, the conceptualization of platooning objects and their operations remained unattended. This paper aims to fill this fundamental gap by developin..