LIPs: A Protocol for Leadership Incentives for Heterogeneous and Dynamic Platoons

With the ever-increasing problems of higher fuel costs and greater traffic congestion, shipping and long-distance travel via interstates and highways continues to become more expensive in terms of time and money. With the advent of semi-and fully-autonomous vehicles, platooning is designed to decrease the amount of fuel used and decrease the space between vehicles to help lower costs and reduce congestion. While much work has been done regarding predetermined platoons with homogeneous vehicles, less work has been done dealing with dynamic and heterogeneous platoons. Dynamic platooning with heterogeneous vehicles open a new horizon of problems with the introduction of several extra variables including dynamic platoon creation and management, untrusted users, differences in vehicle mechanics, and differences in fuel savings. One major problem facing dynamic, heterogeneous platooning is the leadership forfeiture abuse. Because there are currently no incentives for vehicles to lead in these platoons and the savings are much better when being a follower, it is more advantageous for a leader to forfeit their position and step down to become a follower and gain more benefits. In this paper, therefore, we propose a protocol, named as Leadership Incentives for Platoons (LIPs), which is suitable for dynamic platooning with heterogeneous vehicles. While the protocol provides a payment system that incentivizes individuals to lead, it is designed and implemented using the blockchain technology to offer a distributed secure environment for untrusted vehicles to interact. We demonstrate the application of the proposed protocol on a synthetic case study and evaluate the protocol by analyzing the time required for platooning operations/transactions as well as performing a usability test on a potential user group.