Platoon Optimization Based on Truck Pairs

Truck platooning technology allows trucks to drive at short headways to save fuel and associated emissions. However, fuel savings from platooning are relatively small, so forming platoons should be convenient and associated with minimum detours and delays. In this paper, we focus on developing optimization technology to form truck platoons. We formulate a mathematical program for the platoon routing problem with time windows (PRP-TW) based on a time–space network. We provide polynomial-time algorithms to solve special cases of PRP-TW with two-truck platoons. Based on these special cases, we build several fast heuristics. An extensive set of numerical experiments shows that our heuristics perform well. Moreover, we show that simple two-truck platoons already capture most of the potential savings of platooning.