The Impact of Flexible Platoon Formation Operations

Vehicle platooning, a coordinated vehicle movement strategy, has been proposed to address a range of current transport challenges such as traffic congestion, road safety, energy consumption and pollution. While the current literature mainly focuses on platoon control strategies and intra-platoon communication, comparatively little work is done on how to form these platoons. Literature assumes platoon formation by tail merge which is sufficient only for planned formation on a ramp or at a ramp-highway junction. In this article we study the impact of three different merge operations, namely front, middle, and tail merge. The efficiency of these operations is analyzed under different scenarios, varying the vehicles speed adjustment strategy, traffic density, and the density of mergeable vehicles. The impact of the merge operations is represented in terms of merge time, merge distance, average traffic speed, and merge success rate. Our experiments show that in an ideal no traffic scenario, the middle merge is costlier in terms of merge time for the same merge distance whereas in the presence of traffic middle merge helps is quick platoon formation on an average in a higher traffic density in particular. This insight should provide a more flexible toolkit for planning a platoon formation.