A Macroscopic Model for Platooning in Highway Traffic
Giulia Piacentini, Paola Goatin, Antonella Ferrara
Abstract
We consider a model describing the presence of a platoon of vehicles moving in the traffic flow. The model consists of a coupled PDE-ODE system describing the interaction between the platoon and the surrounding traffic flow. The scalar conservation law takes into account the main traffic evolution, while the ODEs describe the trajectories of the initial and final points of the platoon, whose length can vary in time. The presence of the platoon acts as a road capacity reduction, resulting in a space-time discontinuous flux function. We describe the solutions of Riemann problems and design a finite volume numerical scheme sharply capturing nonclassical discontinuities. Some numerical tests are presented to show the effectiveness of the method.