Heavy-Duty Vehicle Platooning : Modeling and Analysis

Sammanfattning: Coupled with the growth of world economy, the demand for freight transport has escalated and will continue to do so. As the traffic intensity increases, the pressure on infrastructure, energy usage and environment becomes higher than ever. Meanwhile, the number of traffic accidents is also increasing year by year as a result. Heavy-duty vehicle (HDV) platooning makes a group of HDVs driving closely after each other.It is one potential solution to improve transport efficiency, traffic safety and fuel economy. Even though there have been extensive studies on the platooning system and corresponding fuel saving, some of the research areas, such as coordination strategies of platooning, platoon operations and the impacts of HDV platooning on trafficflow are still left open. Under a futuristic scenario where a large number of HDVswill be operating in one or several platoons on highway, how to group HDVs intoa platoon and how to select spacing policies for HDV platooning are essential forautomobile manufacturers, fleet operators and transport planners. Therefore, theformation strategies and operations of HDV platoons, as well as the impacts of HDVplatooning on traffic flow have to be carefully investigated.This thesis presents contributions to the modeling of HDV platooning and simulationof HDV platoon operations. The focus lies mainly on analytical formulation ofspeed-density relation of mixed traffic flow and development of simulation frameworkfor study of HDV platooning. On the one hand, a three-regime speed-density relationis proposed to describe the mixed traffic flow consisting of HDVs and passengercars. The proposed speed-density relation incorporates percentage of HDVs, trafficdensity and spacing policy of HDV platoons as input variables and delivers aggregatehighway velocity as output. By comparing the traffic throughput of no HDV platooningscenario, grouping HDVs into platoon using constant vehicle spacing policy orconstant time gap policy results in significant improvement in highway capacity. On the other hand, a simulation framework is developed for implementation of differentHDV platoon operations. The platoon formation of two HDVs and disaggregation ofa five-HDV platoon at off-ramp are simulated on a two-lane highway. The simulationoutcomes show that HDV platoon formation is more favorable in light and mediumtraffic; disaggregation of a long HDV platoon at off-ramp improves the averagespeed of passenger vehicles considerably at high traffic flow rate.