Platooning in SUMO: An Open Source Implementation

Platooning is an application that enhances autonomous driving by means of cooperation. Vehicles, by using wireless communication, exchange data such as position, speed, and acceleration to reduce their inter-vehicle gap and drive in groups, called indeed platoons. The benefits span from improved infrastructure usage to reduced pollution, and from increased safety to a better travel experience. The analysis of a platooning system is complex as it encompasses several research fields, including communication, control theory, traffic engineering, and vehicle dynamics. In addition, even small field operational tests can be extremely expensive in terms of money and time, let alone large scale scenarios. Research studies in platooning can thus highly benefit from simulative analyses, as they overcome the limitations of real world test beds. To this purpose, we developed PLEXE, an extension to the Veins vehicular networking framework that enables the simulation of platooning systems, both from a network and a vehicle dynamics perspective. In this paper we detail the changes PLEXE makes to SUMO to simulate platooning control systems, including realistic engine models for the simulation of vehicle dynamics. In addition, we provide two sample use cases to show its potential.