On March, 8th 2018, at 11:00 AM, in the B208 room, Karl Henrik Johansson presented a talk untitled “Control of vehicle platoons and their influence on traffic”.
Road goods transportation is mainly done by individual long-haulage trucks with no real-time coordination or global optimization. In this talk, we will discuss how to create a networked control system architecture with an integrated logistic system coordinating fleets of trucks traveling together in vehicle platoons. From the reduced air drag, platooning trucks traveling close together can save more than 10% of their fuel consumption. We will discuss new results on how to safely and efficiently control vehicle platoons despite influence of road topology variations and traffic. We also study how automatically controlled platoons effect traffic congestion and how the congestion depends on the fraction of platooned vehicles, intra-platoon spacing and other characteristics. Experiments done on European highways will illustrate system performance and safety requirements. The presentation is mainly based on joint work with collaborators at KTH, MIT, and Scania.