Optimal Control for Platooning in Vehicular Networks

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal control model for truck platooning coordination at stations, using Markov Decision Processes to minimize costs, and finds threshold-based policies that improve efficiency in vehicular networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Markov Decision Process framework for platoon coordination, addressing a system aspect previously underexplored in autonomous vehicular networks.

Findings

Optimal dispatching policy is of threshold type.

Numerical results align with the theoretical optimal policy.

The model effectively minimizes average costs at stations.

Abstract

As the automotive industry is developing autonomous driving systems and vehicular networks, attention to truck platooning has increased as a way to reduce costs (fuel consumption) and improve efficiency in the highway. Recent research in this area has focused mainly on the aerodynamics, network stability, and longitudinal control of platoons. However, the system aspects (e.g., platoon coordination) are still not well explored. In this paper, we formulate a platooning coordination problem and study whether trucks waiting at an initial location (station) should wait for a platoon to arrive in order to leave. Arrivals of trucks at the station and platoons by the station are modelled by independent Bernoulli distributions. Next we use the theory of Markov Decision Processes to formulate the dispatching control problem and derive the optimal policy governing the dispatching of trucks with platoons. We show that the policy that minimizes an average cost function at the station is of threshold type. Numerical results for the average cost case are presented. They are consistent with the optimal ones.