Event-Triggered Distributed Model Predictive Control for Platoon Coordination at Hubs in a Transport System

Abstract

Electric trucks usually need to charge their batteries during long-range delivery missions, and the charging times are often nontrivial. As charging resources are limited, waiting times for some trucks can be prolonged at certain stations. To facilitate the efficient operation of electric trucks, we propose a distributed charging coordination framework. Within the scheme, the charging stations provide waiting estimates to incoming trucks upon request and assign charging ports according to the first-come, first-served rule. Based on the updated information, the individual trucks compute where and how long to charge whenever approaching a charging station in order to complete their delivery missions timely and costeffectively. We perform empirical studies for trucks traveling over the Swedish road network and compare our scheme with the one where charging plans are computed offline, assuming unlimited charging facilities. It is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms the offline approach at the expense of little communication overhead.

Truck Platoon Formation at Hubs: An Optimal Release Time Rule

“…Platoon formation at a single hub when the coordinator knows trucks' arrival schedules to the hub was considered in [16]- [18]. In [19], [20], the authors studied the agent-based platoon formation at multiple hubs in a transportation network, where trucks individually decide their departure times from hubs. In the agent-based approaches, the trucks are required to share their arrival schedules at hubs with each other.…”

Large-Scale Multi-Fleet Platoon Coordination: A Dynamic Programming Approach

“…Different from these optimization methods taking one local hub as the platoon coordinator, the method proposed in this paper takes into account the fleet's platooning profit at all hubs along trucks' routes, which is more beneficial for trucks to make a long-term plan when scheduling their waiting times and to catch up the platooning opportunities at every hub. In our previous research [31], an event-triggered model predictive control method for platoon coordination is proposed, which enables trucks to integrate platooning opportunities at multiple hubs, whereas only single-vehicle platooning is studied.…”