When is it fuel eficient for a heavy duty vehicle to catch up with a platoon?
2013 (English)In: IFAC Proceedings Volumes (IFAC-PapersOnline), 2013, no PART 1, p. 738-743Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Vehicle platooning has in recent years become an important research field for the vehicle industry. By establishing a platoon of heavy duty vehicles, the fuel consumption can be reduced for the follower vehicles due to the slipstream effect. However, as vehicles are scattered on the road driving by themselves, coordination amongst the vehicles is required. In this paper we study the problem of when it is beneficial for a heavy duty vehicle to drive faster in order to catch up and join a platoon. We derive a formula, based on at road and with no vehicle accelerations, to calculate if it is more fuel-eficient for a vehicle to drive faster and platoon or keep driving alone. Depending on the distance between the vehicles and the distance to the destination, the fuel savings vary. For a trip of 350 km, with a distance of 10km to the vehicle ahead, the fuel saving could be up to 7% if the follower vehicle decides to increase the speed from 80 km/h to 90 km/h in order to catch up and form a platoon, assuming an air drag reduction of 32% when platooning. Sensitivity analysis has shown that the speeds need to be relatively accurate in order to not give any false positive catch up decisions.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2013. no PART 1, p. 738-743
Series
IFAC Proceedings Volumes (IFAC-PapersOnline), ISSN 1474-6670 ; 7
Keywords [en]
AND joins, False positive, Fuel savings, Heavy duty vehicles, Research fields, Slipstream effects, Vehicle acceleration, Vehicle industry, Fuel economy, Roads and streets, Vehicles
National Category
Control Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-140023DOI: 10.3182/20130904-4-JP-2042.00071Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-84885921403ISBN: 9783902823434 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-140023DiVA, id: diva2:689780
Conference
7th IFAC Symposium on Advances in Automotive Control, AAC 2013, 4 September 2013 through 7 September 2013, Tokyo
Note
QC 20140121
2014-01-212014-01-162022-06-23Bibliographically approved