Modeling Slipstreaming Effects in Vehicle Platoons

Vehicle platooning can produce significant fuel saving due to reduced aerodynamic drag. In the design of future cooperative driving systems, quantifying such benefits will be of utmost importance, because it will need to be considered in designing, forming and managing platoons. This work aims at developing an Open Source framework for modeling aerodynamics effects. We perform a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study about the aerodynamics of vehicle platoons, describe a model that exploits the resulting measurements, and implement it inside a road traffic simulator to show how savings can be estimated by means of simulations. Furthermore, we publish the necessary tools required to reproduce the results, enabling further research. Strictly speaking, this work does not deal with vehicular networks, but it contributes to tackle the problem of optimizing the management and control of platoons through proper use of communications, from the point of view of fuel consumption and battery usage.