Distributed Urban Platooning towards High Flexibility, Adaptability, and Stability

Abstract

Vehicle platooning reduces the safety distance between vehicles and the travel time of vehicles so that it leads to an increase in road capacity and to saving fuel consumption. In Europe, many projects for vehicle platooning are being actively developed, but mostly focus on truck platooning on the highway with a simpler topology than that of the urban road. When an existing vehicle platoon is applied to urban roads, many challenges are more complicated to address than highways. They include complex topology, various routes, traffic signals, intersections, frequent lane change, and communication interference depending on a higher vehicle density. To address these challenges, we propose a distributed urban platooning protocol (DUPP) that enables high mobility and maximizes flexibility for driving vehicles to conduct urban platooning in a decentralized manner. DUPP has simple procedures to perform platooning maneuvers and does not require explicit conforming for the completion of platooning maneuvers. Since DUPP mainly operates on a service channel, it does not cause negative side effects on the exchange of basic safety messages on a control channel. Moreover, DUPP does not generate any data propagation delay due to contention-based channel access since it guarantees sequential data transmission opportunities for urban platooning vehicles. Finally, to address a problem of the broadcast storm while vehicles notify detected road events, DUPP performs forwarder selection using an analytic hierarchy process. The performance of the proposed DUPP is compared with that of ENSEMBLE which is the latest European platooning project in terms of the travel time of vehicles, the lifetime of an urban platoon, the success ratio of a designed maneuver, the external cost and the periodicity of the urban platooning-related transmissions, the adaptability of an urban platoon, and the forwarder selection ratio for each vehicle. The results of the performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed DUPP is well suited to dynamic urban environments by maintaining a vehicle platoon as stable as possible after DUPP flexibly and quickly forms a vehicle platoon without the support of a centralized node.

Advanced Sensing and Control for Connected and Automated Vehicles

“…This Special Issue of Sensors aims at reporting on some of the recent research efforts on this increasingly important topic. The 12 accepted papers in this Issue cover vehicle position estimation [1], vehicle dynamic parameters estimation [2], cooperative collision warning systems [3], small object detection [4], impact identification of the driver's driving performance on executive control function [5], hybrid path planning for autonomous driving [6], trajectory tracking for autonomous driving [7], vehicle stability control [8], vehicle stability and ride comfort control [9], urban platooning protocol design for platoon [10], path planning algorithm for platooning [11], and self-driving architecture design for CAV platoon [12].…”

“…They include complex topology, various routes, traffic signals, intersections, frequent lane changes, and communication interference depending on a higher vehicle density. To address these challenges, [10] propose a distributed urban platooning protocol (DUPP) that enables high mobility and maximizes flexibility for driving vehicles to conduct urban platooning in a decentralized manner. DUPP performs forwarder selection using an analytic hierarchy process.…”

“…The performance of the proposed DUPP is compared with that of ENSEMBLE, which is the latest European platooning project. The authors of [10] concluded that the proposed DUPP is well suited to dynamic urban environments by maintaining a vehicle platoon as stable as possible.…”

“…In summary, there is a huge potential for CAV in collision avoidance, safety improvement and driving stability improvement. The papers gathered in this Special Issue contributed by proposing solutions to the general problem of state and/or parameter estimation [1][2][3], obstacle detection [4], driver behavior estimation [5], and/or classical academic problems such as path planning [6], path tracking [7], and stability control for autonomous driving [8,9] and/or by suggesting applications of the combined use of sensors and advanced algorithms to platooning [10][11][12], thus showing the theoretical challenges and practical interest of this research topic. Finally, we wish to thank the authors, reviewers, and journal staff for their commitment and effort, which made it possible to complete this Special Issue on time.…”

Should Autonomous Vehicles Collaborate in a Complex Urban Environment or Not?

“…Convoy driving refers to the practice of multiple vehicles driving consecutively in the same lane with small distances between them, maintaining the same speed [3]. While extensive research has been conducted on platooning heavy-duty trucks on highways, limited research has studied convoy driving in an urban environment [4]. Moreover, most studies on urban vehicle platooning have focused on analyzing platoons consisting of only two or three vehicles, with limited exploration of larger platoon sizes [5].…”