Coordinated Vehicle Platooning on Tree Networks: Efficient Time Discretization and Strengthened Formulation

TL;DR

This paper addresses vehicle platooning on tree networks by developing an efficient time discretization method and a strengthened formulation, significantly improving computational performance over previous continuous-time models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel time discretization approach and a tighter mixed-integer linear programming formulation for coordinated vehicle platooning on trees.

Findings

Reformulation outperforms continuous-time models in numerical experiments.

Efficient time discretization enables better optimization of vehicle departure times.

The approach maximizes fuel savings through improved coordination.

Abstract

We consider the coordinated vehicle platooning problem on a tree network with time constraints while the routes of vehicles are given. The problem is to coordinate the departure time of each vehicle to enable platoon formation hence maximizing the total fuel saving. For this problem setting, relative time windows can be defined for all vehicles to which an efficient time discretization can be applied. This property leads to a tight mixed-integer linear program reformulation as compared to the continuous-time formulation involving big-M coefficients proposed in our previous work. It is demonstrated by systematic numerical experiments that the reformulation outperforms the continuous-time formulation for this family of problem instances.