A Modular Approach to Vehicle Management in a Platoon Group

Platooning is a key research area where increased focus and interest is shown in order to maximize the transport efficiency of road vehicles. Although the key benefits are projected as increased fuel efficiency especially when it comes to commercial vehicles, allied benefits such as convoy pack efficiency, traffic throughput rate, increased life cycle of components and a source of monetary benefit when using a subscription model are areas which need to be explored. Existing literature points to control strategies predominantly focused on longitudinal control and traffic management in bottlenecks. Estimating that the application of platooning concepts will penetrate across commercial vehicle segments as well as passenger vehicles leads to the logical need for a modular control approach for aspects such as realizing influence of convoy speed on selection of vehicle position, relative position of vehicles, convoy dynamics based on weak link approach and sharing monetary benefits based on vehicle effort within the pack to maximize the implementation of platooning system. Certain borrowed traits from evolutionary tactics of arctic wolf packs were also examined. Key aspects of vehicle selection are derived to arrive at such a conclusion followed by convoy simulations for its validation and finally a heuristic implementation of such concepts is utilized to reduce online computational effort.