Scanning the Issue

Abstract

The technical maturity of autonomous driving enables the discussion of beneficial use cases to leverage its full potential. This article targets one such use case: Platooning is the efficient convoying of vehicles which makes use of self driving capabilities and inter-vehicle communication. Indeed, the grouping of vehicles in platoons with a small inter-vehicle distance can result in numerous advantages, such as energy savings, congestion reduction, and safety improvements. Yet, given the diversity of involved stakeholders, a wide range of objectives must be balanced to make effective use of platooning’s full potential. Moreover, these objectives depend on various factors that influence their optimization, increasing the complexity of this endeavor. So far, existent work mainly targets a limited subset of related objectives and underlying factors. To further stimulate the optimization of platooning, this article categorizes objectives and influencing factors and proposes metrics for the evaluation of objective attainment.