Coordination of Vehicle Platoons of Random Lengths at Highway Bottlenecks with Capacity Breakdown

This paper considers the coordination among platoons of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) at mixed-autonomy bottlenecks. CAV platooning is an emerging technology with a significant potential for energy saving and throughput improvement. However, interaction between CAV platoons and non-CAV traffic has not been sufficiently understood and addressed. This paper studies such interaction under two critical factors, viz. random platoon lengths and bottleneck capacity breakdown, both of which may lead to throughput loss. We formulate a temporal cell transmission model that explicitly captures the above two elements and can easily incorporate a class of interplatoon coordination strategies. We design a coordination strategy that ensures an invariant set of the traffic state disjoint with the breakdown regime. We use a Lyapunov drift-based approach to show that the proposed strategy stabilizes the traffic if and only if the system is stabilizable, which implies throughput maximization. We finally validate our results in a standard micro-simulation environment.