Evaluation Approach for a Combined Implementation of Day 1 C-ITS and Truck Platooning

Abstract

With the advance of automation in the field of transportation, the number of emerging systems that are going to be deployed on the European roads is growing fast. The aim of C-Roads Italy, part of the Europe-wide C-Roads Project, is to evaluate the impacts on public roads and the feasible operational modes of Truck Platooning, when jointly implemented with Day 1 C-ITS. This paper firstly reports an extended summary of the available bibliography on Truck Platooning, focused on the assessment of the implementation scenario presented as an example in Section IV. The literature review is necessary to investigate the more promising implementation schemes in the short term on the European area and the system expected impacts when deployed as a stand-alone service. Then, the evaluation methodology that is currently being drafted in the activity of C-Roads Italy is described, aimed to assess the jointed impact of Day 1 C-ITS services and Truck Platooning. Finally, a meaningful example of the approach for the evaluation of the jointed implementation of Truck Platooning and C-ITS services is presented, considering one of the use cases of the Road Works Warning Service, as defined in the current version of the C-Roads documents.

Roadworks Warning—Closure of a Lane, the Impact of C-ITS Messages

“…Again, it should be highlighted how the chosen research questions at this stage of the evaluations reflect a focus on traffic efficiency and a focus on the segment upstream the roadworks for the reasons listed in Section 3. Once the field tests programmed within C-Roads in Italy are carried out and a more precise behavioral feedback is obtained, the evaluation should be widened also to impact sreas such as safety and environment [9,10,13,14] and could allow to reproduce the behavior within the roadworks rather than upstream.…”

Definition of a Python Script for the Micro-Simulation of the Truck Platooning System

“…In fact, as mentioned by Sia Partners (2016), reducing the time gap from 1.5 to 0.5 s can lead to a reduction of the spatial gap equal to 22 m and to a resulting increase by around 30% of road capacity. This benefit too is bound to the number of kilometres that the platoon drives in formation; it should be highlighted though how the benefits of truck platoons driving in formation must be compared with the potential negative impacts arising from the following manoeuvres: dissolving the platoon, responding to a cut-in 1 , adapting the headway and reacting to changes in boundary conditions such as roadworks ahead (Deng 2016;Andersson et al 2017;Agriesti et al 2018a); two of which will be evaluated in Section 4. All these manoeuvres and possible interactions with the surrounding traffic should be formalized in research and sub-research questions (Studer et al 2019;Agriesti et al 2018a) and evaluated before the field-test phase or, at least, before the large-scale deployment of the system.…”

“…The replication of all the needed scenarios is hardly achievable only through field-tests; therefore, a traffic simulation software should be able to reproduce manoeuvres like cut-ins, dissolution of the platoon and headway adaptation. It is clear that traffic modelling is not a substitute for field-tests on public roads; rather it should be conceived as a tool to upscale the field-test results to all the traffic scenarios that could be relevant to a complete evaluation of the system (Studer et al 2019;Agriesti et al 2018b).…”

“…This paper wants to provide this tool in a way that is easy to integrate with the PTV Vissim micro-simulation software (https://www.ptvgroup.com/en/ solutions/products/ptv-vissim) and is able to reproduce the behaviour of a platoon of trucks in a precise but also flexible way. The script presented in this paper includes, in fact, all the longitudinal behavioural adaptation that could be performed in real life and that emerged from the bibliographical review carried out by Agriesti et al (2018b).…”

“…Therefore, the authors identified this lack of a common tool, easy to use and usable by everyone, as a gap to be filled in order to provide a shared algorithm and promote in literature simulation studies that are comparable and replicable. In fact, for every evaluation activity there should be an intermediate phase between the ex-ante and the ex-post ones in which a transport system is analysed through modelling works or other surrogate evaluation methodologies (Studer et al 2019;Agriesti et al 2018b). Moreover, the tool described is applied to assess what is the best driving strategy a platoon should follow to minimize its impact at an on-ramp area both as proof of concept and to obtain first valuable results aimed at enriching the current literature.…”