Cyber-Physical-Social Motivated Collaborative Platoon Heads Selection for Intelligent and Connected Vehicles

Vehicle platoon service is considered as a promising framework for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to reduce energy cost, and meanwhile enhance driving safety and comfortability. In platoon service, platoon head takes the crucial role for the quality of service. The secure and trustworthy platoon heads with good driving skills will provide a better service than untrusted ones. How to motivate secure platoon heads for the platoon service becomes an interesting problem. In this paper, we formulate the trust platoon heads selection as a platoon utility maximization (PUM) problem. Then we employ game-theoretical approach showing that the PUM game is a potential game, and thus exists a Nash Equilibrium. Furthermore, we propose a cyber-physical-social approach to motivate vehicles to become platoon heads and at the same time maximize the platoon utility by seeking for the Nash Equilibrium. The extensive evaluation results show that the proposed platoon heads selection approach effectively stimulate more trustworthy users to be platoon heads and gains up to 60% more platoon utility compared with baseline methods.