Effects of Bus Platooning in an Urban Environment

One typical application of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is vehicle platooning where a group of vehicles travel with smaller inter-vehicle distance safely, improving energy efficiency as well as road capacity and traffic safety. Truck platooning on highways has been widely studied and showed the aforementioned effects. However, the platooning of buses in urban environments have not been investigated thoroughly in the literature. This paper examines the effects of bus platooning with respect to traffic control and energy consumption. Microscopic traffic simulations have been conducted to demonstrate that bus platooning improves the quality of service of buses and maintains the quality of the traffic flow. Subsequently, driving cycles of buses generated from the simulation study serve as input for an energy consumption analysis, showing that not only bus platooning itself result in a reduction of energy consumption but the traffic signal prioritisation for bus platooning lead to additional energy savings.