Effects of Coordinated Formation of Vehicle Platooning in a Fleet of Shared Automated Vehicles: An Agent-based model

This paper aims to explore the performance of the autonomous mobility-on-demand system (AMoD) with the coordinated formation of vehicle platooning. In this study, an agent-based model (ABM) is developed to explicitly simulate the operations of platooning formation and interactions between shared automated vehicles (SAVs) and real-time travel requests. The objective is to capture the real-time behavior of SAVs as trip makers, and then assess the performance of the AMoD system with the mechanism of coordinated formation of platoons. We conclude that the impact of vehicle assignment strategies in the AMoD system with vehicle platooning formation predominately affects the average waiting time and system capacity to transport travelers as a whole; however, vehicle platooning, to some extent, could lengthen the travel time of platoon vehicles. The hold-on time (imposed delay) of leading vehicles in order to form a platoon could affect the average time delay of vehicles part of those platoons. The developed ABM provides the first insight into the impact of the pervasive formation of vehicle platooning on the performance of the AMoD system.