Vehicle sorting for platoon formation: Impacts on highway entry and throughput

Automated highway systems (AHS) are intended to increase the throughput and safety of roadways through computer control, communication and sensing. In the platoon concept for AHS, vehicles travel on highways in closely spaced groups. To maximize benefits, it is desirable to form platoons that are reasonably large (five or more vehicles), and it is also desirable to ensure that platoons remain intact for considerable distances. This paper develops and evaluates strategies for organizing vehicles into platoons at highway entrances, with the objective of maximizing the distance that platoons stay intact, so that they do not need to be regrouped into new platoons on the highway itself. Fundamentally, this entails grouping vehicles according to their destination. We evaluate various strategies in which vehicles are sorted on entrance ramps, with respect to platoon sizes, throughput and platoon formation time. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.