Platoon Control in Traffic Networks: New Challenges And Opportunities

The presentation deals with the possibility of defining control actions for vehicle platoons in a road traffic network not only devoted to an effective behaviour of platoon themselves, but also considering them as possible actuators to mitigate traffic congestion. It is known that the formation of platoons presents relevant advantages for the involved vehicles, first of all in terms of fuel consumption. Besides this, in this presentation, the concept of platoon is further developed by investigating the possibility of exploiting the presence of platoons also for relieving congestion for the whole traffic stream. In this sense, each platoon can be considered as a moving bottleneck that affects the surrounding traffic conditions depending on its size (i.e., the number of vehicles composing it), the position of vehicles, and its speed. By appropriately acting on these aspects, each platoon can be adopted as an actuator of traffic management strategies. Several control schemes have been proposed in the literature, from simple feedback regulators to model predictive control schemes, both in centralized architectures and in decentralized ones. The different schemes are presented and their effectiveness, analyzed by means of simulations, is discussed. The main open issues, related to modelling aspects, to information management requirements and to the practical applicability of the ideas behind the research work, are also introduced in order to evaluate opportunities and challenges.