Real-Time Planning of Platoons Coordination Decisions Based on Traffic Prediction

This paper deals with the optimal speed control of two platoons that share part of their freeway routes and need to perform merging and diverging procedures. The proposed control scheme has a centralized nature and is applied periodically by the platoons coordinator which receives in real time the state of the platoons and the traffic measurements on the network, based on which a traffic prediction is made. Based on this information, the coordinator applies specific optimal control algorithms to decide whether the merger is convenient or not and to compute the optimal speed profiles of the two platoons before the merging, during the shared journey and after the diverging phase.