Poster: Platooning Revisited: What is the Personal Benefit Compared to ACC and Human Driving?

Platooning has been researched for decades but debate about its lasting impact is still ongoing. Meanwhile, adaptive cruise control (ACC) became de facto standard for all new cars as well as for automated driving on the freeway. An evaluation of the personal benefit these systems offer remains difficult. To this end, we propose to assess driving systems by looking at the overall trip cost to incentivize drivers accordingly. For this, we define a novel metric to quantify the total trip cost, combining fuel cost and travel time within a monetary unit. We show the application of our new metric in a case study, comparing human driving, ACC, and platooning. Our results indicate that human driving always loses against ACC and that platooning has a significant advantage in mid to high traffic densities.