Efficient Position Change Algorithms for Prolonging Driving Range of a Truck Platoon

Cooperative automated driving technology has emerged as a potential way to increase the efficiency of transportation systems and enhance traffic safety by allowing vehicles to exchange relevant information via wireless communication. Truck platooning utilizes this technology and achieves synchronized braking and acceleration, controlling two or more trucks simultaneously. This synchronized control makes driving with a very short inter-vehicle distance among trucks possible and reduces aerodynamic drag. This provides significant fuel consumption reduction, both in leading and trailing trucks, and achieves fuel-saving improvement. However, the static positioning sacrifices trucks in the front since they consume more fuel energy because of more air resistance than the rears. To solve this in-equivalent fuel consumption reduction benefit, this paper presents several heuristic algorithms to balance fuel consumption reduction and prolong the driving ranges by exploiting position changes among trucks in a platoon. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms try to reduce the number of position changes as much as possible to prevent any fuel waste caused by the unnecessary position change operations. In this manner, each truck in the platoon is likely to share a similar fuel consumption reduction with fewer position change counts, thus addressing the challenge of in-equivalent fuel savings distribution and obtaining optimal fuel efficiency. Our extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can prolong the total distance by approximately 3% increased in two-truck platooning and even higher in six-trucks platooning of approximately 8%. Moreover, our proposed algorithms can decrease the position change count and ensure that trucks only switch to position arrangement once with no duplicate. Therefore, truck platooning obtains the maximum driving range with fewer position change counts, thus achieving efficient fuel saving.