A comparison of mechanisms for compensating negative impacts of system integration

Abstract The demand for passenger and freight transportation has grown sharply over the last decades and will triple by 2050. This also dramatically impacts the environment as traffic is one of the primary sources of CO2 emission. Platooning, which is defined as driving automated vehicles in convoys with minimal inter-vehicle distance enabled by vehicular communication, offers several benefits like energy savings due to slipstream effects, homogenization of traffic flows, increased capacity of streets, as well as improved safety due to communication. However, as the vehicles at inner positions of a platoon experience higher benefits than the first and last vehicle, the compensation of the effects of different positions in a platoon have to be taken into account when integrating vehicles in a platoon. In this paper, we discuss several strategies on how to incentivize vehicles to participate in platooning based on directly or indirectly compensating vehicles for fewer benefits resulting from the integration into a platooning system. Our considerations integrate ideas from research about altruism, social sciences, organ donation, task scheduling on computers, as well as professional cycling sports. Our experiments show that the time spent in a position with negative effects is split equally among all vehicles when using our mechanisms. Additionally, we found that characteristics of the environment—e.g., the number of lanes or traffic density—impact the performance of the compensation mechanisms. We further provide a discussion of the identified challenges and on how to apply our proposed ideas to other systems which require self-integration.