Cost allocation of cooperative autonomous truck platooning: Efficiency and stability analysis

This study investigates the cost allocation of cooperative autonomous truck (AT) platooning among carriers. Motivated by the fuel consumption saving from truck platooning, carriers can collaborate for creating more platooning opportunities in an alliance. The formation of carrier alliance is associated with two key conditions: (i) efficiency: the total cost is allocated to each carrier without a budget deficit, and (ii) stability: all carriers find it beneficial to stay in the grand alliance and do not form sub-alliance. Since an alliance satisfying these two conditions may not always exist, we aim to find a cost allocation such that the violation of efficiency and stability conditions is minimized. We first propose a cooperative AT platooning problem for a trade-off between fuel consumption savings and schedule deviation cost. Then, we model the problem as a cooperative AT platooning game and formulate cost allocation models. The exact row-generation solution method is developed to computationally calculate the cost allocation. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the properties of proposed models and the effectiveness of solution methods. The results show that the developed row-generation solution method can solve the instances of up to 100 requests and 20 carriers within a two-hour time limit, and the schedule deviation coefficients significantly impact the performance of optimal cost allocation.