A Platooning Strategy for Connected Automated Vehicles in Passing a General Conflict Area

Vehicle scheduling in roadway conflict areas is a common yet challenging problem. Due to the huge vehicle population, solving the scheduling problem usually takes a significant amount of time and thus cannot satisfy real-time operation needs. To efficiently approach this problem, this study proposes a platooning strategy for connected automated vehicles when passing a general conflict area. The proposed strategy clusters vehicles into platoons and treats each platoon as a scheduling unit instead of every vehicle to reduce the problem dimension. Theoretical analyses illustrate that the optimal solution gap (in terms of vehicle delay) between the single-vehicle-based strategy and the proposed platoon-based strategy is bounded. Further, numerical experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed strategy in reducing the scheduling problem size without much loss of solution optimality by comparing it with an existing benchmark.