Coordinating Vehicle Platoons for Highway Bottleneck Decongestion and Throughput Improvement

Truck platooning is a technology that is expected to become widespread in the coming years. Apart from the numerous benefits that it brings, its potential effects on the overall traffic situation need to be studied further, especially at bottlenecks and ramps. Assuming we can control the platoons from the infrastructure, they can be used as controlled moving bottlenecks, actuating control actions on the rest of the traffic, and potentially improving the throughput of the whole system. In this paper, we use a multi-class cell transmission model to capture the interaction between truck platoons and background traffic, and propose a corresponding queuing model, which we use for control design. We use platoon speeds, and the number of lanes platoons occupy as control inputs, and design a control strategy for throughput improvement of a highway section with a bottleneck. By postponing and shaping the inflow to the bottleneck, we are able to avoid traffic breakdown and capacity drop, which significantly reduces the total time spent of all vehicles. We derived the estimated improvement in throughput that is achieved by applying the proposed control law, and then tested it in a simulation study and found that the median delay of all vehicles by 75.6% compared to the uncontrolled case. Notably, although they are slowed down while actuating control actions, platooned vehicles experience less delay compared to the case without control, since they avoid going through congestion at the bottleneck.