Intelligent vehicle platooning transit: System design, operations management, and field and simulation experiments

This paper serves as a technical review on an emerging demand-responsive, vehicle platoon-based, exclusive lane-delimited mass transit system, which is officially named Intelligent Vehicle Platooning Transit (IVPT). Different from previous studies on vehicle platooning systems for passenger and freight transportation, the focus of this paper is on systematically analyzing IVPT’s system components and technologies, operations design and management issues, and field and simulation experiment results. We also present a techno-economic comparison between IVPT and other existing urban public transportation systems. The analysis and comparison highlight several key advantages of this new transit system: 1) The cruise speed of its moving vehicles is guaranteed to be at its design value and seldom disturbed due to the use of vehicle platoons, exclusive lanes, and signal priority; 2) its direct station-to-station passenger-carrying service eliminates passengers’ transfer time and inconvenience and enhance their arrival punctuality to a maximum extent; 3) online trip booking, passenger-vehicle matching and passenger-seat assignment allow passengers to specify their boarding and alighting stations, departure times, vehicle types, and seating preference and hence greatly reduce their waiting time at stations and enhancing overall travel satisfaction; and 4) it involves much lower construction and maintenance costs than a conventional mass transportation system with the potential of faster implementation. In our conclusion, IVPT offers a sustainable, flexible, scalable, and cost-effective mass transit solution and has potential of becoming a backbone transit system for future urban areas.