COMPANION · Cooperative dynamic formation of platoons for safe and energy-optimized goods transportation

The objective of the project is to develop co-operative mobility technologies for supervised vehicle platooning, in order to improve fuel efficiency and safety for goods transport. The potential social and environmental benefits inducted by heavy-duty vehicle platoons (or road trains) have been largely proven. However, until now, the creation, coordination, and operation of such platoons have been mostly neglected. In addition, the regulation and standardization of coordinated, together with its acceptance by the end-users and the society need further attention and research. The proposed idea is to develop a new energy-efficient and user-friendly integrated framework to coordinated driving of heavy-duty vehicles.<br/>We propose a new real-time coordination system, which will define an optimized flow of vehicles in order to dynamically create, maintain and dissolve platoons according to an online decision-making mechanism, taking into account also historical and real-time information about the state of the infrastructure. With such a technology, platoons will be no more composed just of vehicles with common origins and destinations, but they will be created dynamically on the road, by merging vehicles (or sub-platoons) that share also only subparts of their routes. The proposed idea is therefore a novel enabling technology with the potential to revolutionise today's freight logistics and overall transportation infrastructure.