Platoon Coordination of Electric Trucks at a Charging Station

Sammanfattning: Electric trucks and platooning technology are expected to be part of the transportation system in the near future. Therefore, it is important to develop platoon coordination strategies and study the potential of platooning for when trucks are electric. In this paper, we study the platoon coordination problem at a single charging station where electric trucks can charge while they wait for other trucks to form platoons with.We assume all trucks to have identical routes after the charging station. The objective is to maximize the total reward of all trucks, including the platooning profit and cost of waiting.Moreover, the trucks have waiting time constraints to respect their mission deadlines and charging time constraints to make sure they can travel between the hub and destination without running out of battery. The energy consumption is decreased when driving as a follower truck in a platoon, which decreases the minimum charging time for the truck. We formulate the platoon coordination problem of electric trucks as a linear integer optimization problem. To evaluate the method, it was compared to a simpler coordination method. The savings from platooning with electric vehicles, using both coordination methods, were also compared to platooning with diesel trucks. The results showed that platooning with electric vehicles can save up to 10% of the driving cost and therefore have significant economic benefits. It was also shown that the method has an acceptable computational efficiency for real-time coordination.