Spacing Allocation Method for Vehicular Platoon: A Cooperative Game Theory Approach

Featured Application The proposed method is applied to spacing allocation of the vehicles in platoon. Recently, spacing policies of the vehicular platoon have been widely developed to enhance safety, traffic efficiency, and fuel consumption. However, the integrated spacing policies aim to maximum overall benefit, and the distributed spacing policies intense to get optimal monomer benefit. Ignoring the fairness of the benefit allocation of each vehicle will reduce the motivation to constitute the platoon. To fill this critical gap, this study proposes a spacing allocation method by treating spacing decisions as cooperative games. A flock's model which is used to be the payoff function is introduced based on bionic motion principles. We present a characteristic function of the platoon for the cooperative game model considering the specific structure of the platoon. The tau value, Shapley value, and average lexicographic value are introduced and applied to allocate the spacing fairly. Proposed methods are compared with constant distance policy in some typical situations. The simulation results demonstrate that the spacing policy based on cooperative game theory improved the stable time for consistency control and the convergence of longitudinal following error.