Platoon Formation Algorithm for Minimizing Travel Time

One way to improve traffic conditions is to encourage drivers to join platoons, i.e. strings of connected vehicles (CVs) maintaining a short headway on the road. In this paper, we introduce an optimization algorithm that assigns CVs that wish to join a platoon to existing nearby platoons such that the total travel time of all traffic participants is optimized. We assume that platoons are travelling on a dedicated high-occupancy platoon (HOP) lane and are capable of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. Our algorithm consists of two layers, where the first optimizes for which platoon and its side (front/back) a CV could join, and the second decides which of the participating CVs should merge based on a score function (estimated merging time). Simulations show that our algorithm achieves up to a 20% travel time reduction compared to a random merging procedure and that 70% of time reduction comes from an optimized vehicle selection (second layer).