Impacts of Platooning of Connected Automated Vehicles on Highways

Martínez-Díaz, Margarita; Al-Haddad, Christelle; Soriguera, Francesc; Antoniou, Constantinos · 2024 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1109/tits.2024.3350776

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Summary

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review analyzing the impacts of Connected Automated Vehicle (CAV) platooning on highways. The research addresses the significant variability and uncertainty in existing studies regarding the benefits of platooning, such as traffic efficiency, safety, and environmental impacts. The authors aim to organize existing research, establish links between proposed strategies and their expected outcomes, and identify critical research gaps to guide future investigations. The methodology involved a structured search of the Scopus database for publications from 2010 to June 2022. After an iterative selection process based on relevance, citation count, and topic alignment, the final analysis included 57 documents, primarily research papers. The review categorized studies by distinctive features, including vehicle type (cars vs. trucks), automation levels, platoon composition (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous), and car-following rules. The authors analyzed boundary conditions such as communication topologies, penetration rates, and infrastructure scenarios. Notably, the review found that simulation is the predominant analysis tool, with only 8.8% of papers describing field experiments. Key findings reveal two major limitations in the current state-of-the-art. First, few CAV platooning strategies have been proven to be asymptotically stable, a necessary requirement for feasible deployment. Second, most platooning algorithms are simplistic adaptations of human-driven car-following models, which inadvertently transfer existing traffic problems to future cooperative environments. The review identified that 66.7% of studies focus on car platooning, while 28.1% address truck platooning. Regarding car-following policies, constant time gap policies are predominant, though temporal gaps are generally associated with greater stability than spatial gaps. The analysis also highlighted inconsistencies in defining automation levels and information exchange topologies, with 60.9% of studies failing to specify the communication topology used. The significance of this work lies in its identification of clear requirements for maximizing the practical benefits of CAV platooning. By synthesizing disparate results, the authors provide a common starting point for future research, emphasizing the need for stability-focused algorithms and realistic mixed-traffic scenarios. The paper concludes that current literature lacks sufficient empirical validation and often relies on idealized assumptions, such as 100% penetration rates, which limits the applicability of findings. The authors suggest that future investigations must address these gaps to ensure that platooning technologies can effectively improve traffic flow, safety, and energy efficiency in real-world highway environments.

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