Platoon coordination with time windows: an operational perspective

It has been reported that platooning has the potential of saving fuel and increasing traffic throughput. We formulate a platoon coordination problem with soft time windows as a mixed-integer linear programming problem and solve it with exact solutions. The objective function consists of operation costs, schedule miss penalties and fuel costs. In the numerical example, a Swedish highway network model is used and the computation result shows that, for 21 vehicles, the total cost can be reduced by 3.5% when the optimal preferred arrival times are chosen. A random disturbance is then added to the optimal time windows and the optimal result shows great sensitivity with respect to the disturbance. When the mean of the disturbance becomes larger than 10 minutes, more than half of the platooning benefits will be lost. The study also analyzes the change of different cost compositions as disturbance increases.