What are the most influential factors in a vehicle platoon?

Vehicle platooning is a promising solution to improve traffic behaviour for autonomous vehicles. The advantages of this mode of transportation include decreased travel time, reduced pollution, improved fuel consumption, and the potential to avoid traffic congestion. However, the technology is not yet mature enough due to several technical challenges that complicate its development in real systems, such as vehicle heterogeneity, the presence of disturbances such as wind on vehicle longitudinal dynamics, and delays and interruptions in communication networks, among others. This paper examines the individual effects of each aspect to determine their order of relevance and establish a framework for designing robust vehicle platoon controllers to handle such effects.