Abstract
Cooperative automated driving technology has emerged as a potential way to increase the efficiency of transportation systems and enhance traffic safety by allowing vehicles to exchange relevant information via wireless communication. Truck platooning utilizes this technology and achieves synchronized braking and acceleration, controlling two or more trucks simultaneously. This synchronized control makes driving with a very short inter-vehicle distance among trucks possible and reduces aerodynamic drag. This provides significant fuel consumption reduction, both in leading and trailing trucks, and achieves fuel-saving improvement. However, the static positioning sacrifices trucks in the front since they consume more fuel energy because of more air resistance than the rears. To solve this in-equivalent fuel consumption reduction benefit, this paper presents several heuristic algorithms to balance fuel consumption reduction and prolong the driving ranges by exploiting position changes among trucks in a platoon. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms try to reduce the number of position changes as much as possible to prevent any fuel waste caused by the unnecessary position change operations. In this manner, each truck in the platoon is likely to share a similar fuel consumption reduction with fewer position change counts, thus addressing the challenge of in-equivalent fuel savings distribution and obtaining optimal fuel efficiency. Our extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can prolong the total distance by approximately 3% increased in two-truck platooning and even higher in six-trucks platooning of approximately 8%. Moreover, our proposed algorithms can decrease the position change count and ensure that trucks only switch to position arrangement once with no duplicate. Therefore, truck platooning obtains the maximum driving range with fewer position change counts, thus achieving efficient fuel saving.
Highlights
Autonomous driving technology has significantly contributed to the automotive industry, where it promises the potential of improving safety and efficiency in the transportation system by reducing dangerous human driving behavior
The results show that trucks in the platoon remarkably achieve fuel-saving approximately from 7% to 15% at 8 m inter-vehicle distance, and about only 2% to 11% fuel saving at 15 m
For the fuel consumption reduction parameter g(i), we use the results studied by Lu et al [5]
Summary
Autonomous driving technology has significantly contributed to the automotive industry, where it promises the potential of improving safety and efficiency in the transportation system by reducing dangerous human driving behavior. While the number of vehicle traffic crashes is likely to rise consecutively, an autonomous vehicle becomes likewise one of the most intensively researched technologies to prevent such tragic accidents over the past decades It benefits many industries, including transportation and logistics, expecting to get positive impacts on cost reduction as it can decrease the cost of congestion and improve energy economy. This paper proposes an improved position change algorithm that promises a smaller number of position changes, achieving more efficient fuel-saving while still achieving the highest driving range. The simulation-based evaluation shows that the number of position changes is significantly reduced compared to the original algorithm It can significantly decrease fuel costs per freight transportation, enhancing fuel economy and providing much more traffic efficiency.
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