Fuel-Efficient En Route Formation of Truck Platoons

The problem of how to coordinate a large fleet of trucks with a given itinerary to enable fuel-efficient platooning is considered. Platooning is a promising technology that enables trucks to save significant amounts of fuel by driving close together and thus reducing air drag. A setting is considered in which each truck in a fleet is provided with a start location, a destination, a departure time, and an arrival deadline from a higher planning level. Fuel-efficient plans should be computed. The plans consist of routes and speed profiles that allow trucks to arrive by their arrival deadlines. Hereby, trucks can meet on common parts of their routes and form platoons, resulting in decreased fuel consumption. We formulate a combinatorial optimization problem that combines plans involving only two vehicles. We show that this problem is difficult to solve for large problem instances. Hence, a heuristic algorithm is proposed. The resulting plans are further optimized using convex optimization techniques. The method is evaluated with Monte Carlo simulations in a realistic setting. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can compute plans for thousands of trucks and that significant fuel savings can be achieved.