A Simulation Study on Effects of Platooning Gaps on Drivers of Conventional Vehicles in Highway Merging Situations

Platooning refers to a group of vehicles that—enabled by wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication and vehicle automation—drives with short inter-vehicular distances. Before its deployment on public roads, several challenging traffic situations need to be handled. Among the challenges are cut-in situations, where a conventional vehicle—a vehicle that has no automation or V2V communication—changes lane and ends up between vehicles in a platoon. This paper presents results from a simulation study of a scenario, where a conventional vehicle, approaching from an on-ramp, merges into a platoon of five cars on a highway. We created the scenario with four platooning gaps: 15, 22.5, 30, and 42.5 meters. During the study, the conventional vehicle was driven by 37 test persons, who experienced all the platooning gaps using a driving simulator. The participants’ opinions towards safety, comfort, and ease of driving between the platoon in each gap setting were also collected through a questionnaire. The results suggest that a 15-meter gap prevents most participants from cutting in, while causing potentially dangerous maneuvers and collisions when cut-in occurs. A platooning gap of at least 30 meters yield positive opinions from the participants, and facilitating more smooth cut-in maneuvers while less collisions were observed.