Transportation of Goods in Inner-City Centers: Can Autonomous Vehicles in Platoon Be a Suitable Solution?

The transportation of goods in inner-city centers has become a huge challenge for cities that want to ensure a reliable and efficient service for good delivery with less socio-economic and ecological impacts. The new opportunities brought by the development of automated functions for vehicles leads to a restructuring of the possible services. The goal of this paper is to present first an overview of the existing solutions for goods transportations systems based on automated and/or alternative solutions and second to sketch the outline and the related issues of a possible solution based on platoon control.