Cross-provider Platoons for Same-day Delivery

Platooning – vehicles travelling close together behaving as a unit – aims to improve network throughput both on highways and in urban traffic. We study the problem of platoon formation in an urban environment using the scenario of logistic service providers equipped with fleets of autonomously driving pods to carry out same-day delivery tasks by creating cross-provider platoons. The novelty of our work is that we investigate the problem of cross-provider platoons, i.e., platoons with members from different self-interested logistic service providers. Our aim is to study platoon formation mechanisms and possible benefits of cross-provider platooning using simulation. We formulate optimal platoon formation as an integer linear optimisation problem (ILP), aiming to find the longest sub-routes to be shared between vehicles by platooning. The proposed method was implemented and tested on a mesoscopic model to simulate platoon formation and operation, on real network data with realistic background traffic models. Comparing our method to a simpler route matching algorithm reveals comparable system level performance; however, our method performs better with respect to local participant utility, i.e.appears more suited to take vehicle/provider preferences into account.