Research Statement: Urban Platooning

CACC systems have been proven to increase road utilization, safety and decrease fuel consumption by driving with a small headway at freeway speed. Such platooning systems are usually focused on freeway scenarios and most of the current research is done for this use case. Especially in urban scenarios at traffic lights and intersections there is a lot of potential to increase the traffic efficiency and safety by applying platooning mechanisms. Most of the techniques used on freeways are not applicable for urban scenarios, as freeways are more or less a multi lane one-way road. In my PhD project I want to investigate platooning as an application for urban scenarios. For this I plan to examine platooning for signalized and non-signalized intersections in a first step, but also consider platoon formation strategies and driver models for human driven platoons. The end result should be a set of algorithms and strategies to make urban and rural traffic more efficient and safer by the use of platooning. Evaluation and analysis will mainly be done by using simulations, but not limited to that.