Quantifying Highway Flow Improvements via CACC-Based Truck Platooning: A Statistical Modeling Approach

The advancement of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) technology enables vehicle platooning on public roads, offering significant potential to enhance urban mobility, driving safety, and energy efficiency. Among various applications, truck platooning has become a promising strategy to increase highway flow rates by reducing vehicle headways, improving coordination, and optimizing space utilization. This paper presents a quantitative assessment of a CACC-based truck platooning system in terms of the effectiveness in improving highway mobility under varying traffic conditions. A statistical regression model is developed and calibrated using simulation of real-world highway networks to identify the key factors and assess the flow improvement of truck platoons on highways. The analysis focuses on five primary variables: desired platoon speed, platoon size, space headway, platooning truck percentage, and non-platoon traffic flows. The study systematically evaluates how each of these parameters affects the overall traffic throughput. The results demonstrate that truck platooning can increase highway flow rates by up to 200%, especially under high truck volumes and large platoon sizes. Meanwhile, platoon size and truck percentage are positively related to flow rates, indicating that more vehicles operating in coordinated platoons contribute to higher mobility. In contrast, higher desired speeds and larger space headways may reduce the effectiveness of platooning due to decreasing traffic density. Overall, the study quantitively assesses the mobility benefit of truck platooning and identifies the potential to improve highway operations. The accomplishments of the study will be extended to analyze platoon induced energy and emission benefits and evaluate the performance of platooning strategies for large-scale deployment.