Spatial and Temporal Synchronization of Truck Platoons

Abstract

Truck platooning technology allows trucks to drive at short headways to save fuel and associated emissions. However, fuel savings from platooning are relatively small so forming platoons should be convenient and with minimum detour and delays. In this paper, we focus on developing optimization technology to match trucks into platoons. We formulate a mathematical program for the platoon routing problem with time windows (PRP-TW) based on a time-space network. We provide polynomial time algorithms to solve special cases of the PRP-TW with 2-truck platoons. Based on these special cases, we build several fast heuristics for the PRP-TW and show that these heuristics perform well. Moreover, we show that simple 2-truck platoons already capture most of the potential savings of platooning.

Keywords: truck platoons, optimization, time-space network, fuel savings