A platoon-based eco-driving control mechanism for low-density traffic flow

Forming traffic into platoons on the road has the potential for mitigation of traffic congestion and improvement in fuel economy, and can be more readily achieved by leveraging emerging connected and automated vehicles. This paper proposes a platoon-based eco-driving control mechanism that forms small-sized platoons and guides them to move on low-density traffic corridors. To facilitate this investigation, a low-density traffic corridor is divided into an initial road segment plus a series of subsequent road segments. To ensure computational efficiency, an approximate model based on the predefined function is employed. Simulation shows that traffic flow of small-sized platoons can bring considerable benefits in fuel consumption compared to that of large-sized platoons. This proposed control mechanism is shown to be significant in fuel economy.