A Study on the Behavior of Vehicle Platoons and Platoon Formation and Dissolution Strategies

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. The current literature and on-road platooning trials typically assume a planned formation at the source and dissolution at the destination. In contrast, this research considers platoons that can be formed in an ad-hoc manner, on the fly, opportunistically. 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. This thesis aims to fill this fundamental gap of..