Dynamic and Flexible Platooning in Urban Areas

Platooning for trucks on highways has been largely investigated in several research projects. There, the platoons are used to be safe and efficient "road trains" of close following vehicles centrally managed by a platoon leader via V2X communications. Once such a platoon is formed, it is very stable and often restricted to one lane. At the same time, Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) uses a distributed approach in which any vehicle can use V2X receptions to maintain a constant gap from the preceding one. In this sense, quasi-platoons composed by CACC vehicles became an option for more flexible platoons under urban conditions. Lioris et al. (2016) therefore performed simulations to demonstrate the positive effects on throughput on urban roads when a CACC-platoon passes signalized intersections. But platooning under urban conditions is more than just passing intersections in close distance, and it is much more dynamic and flexible compared to platooning on highways. First, opportunities for vehicles to build platoons have to be detected based on some local common criteria (e.g. similar destinations, acceleration capabilities, speed requirements). Secondly, while driving in a platoon, various dynamic situations have to be handled, like platoon splitting, recombining, breaking-up by conventional vehicles, urgent reactions to vulnerable road users, etc. Furthermore, the efficiency of urban platoons can be increased when platoon members and the infrastructure cooperate, e.g. in terms of adaptive traffic light control or cooperative sensing. Within the EU H2020 project MAVEN (Managing Automated Vehicles Enhances Network), dynamic urban platooning is investigated, esp. in the light of hierarchical traffic management. How can infrastructure help to enhance traffic efficiency and safety in urban areas by also taking into account platoons? MAVEN is going to answer this question by performing traffic simulations and prototypic implementations. This paper provides detailed information on the first steps taken in MAVEN related to flexible urban platooning. New approaches for dynamic platoon initialization, joining, leaving and splitting are discussed. The proposed communication protocols and the detailed logic for platoon members are presented. Furthermore, first results of simulations and prototypic implementations are shown