Development and comparison of two different strategies for building a platoon of vehicles

The problem of driving a car automatically within a platoon has attracted wide attention in recent years. Among he proposed approaches the concept of Autonomous Intelligent Cruise Control (AICC) has the best prospects of a realisation and prototypes of this scheme are already in field tests. While the problem of driving in an automated platoon can be regarded as conceptually solved, only minor attention has been devoted to the problem of composing and decomposing of a platoon under dynamic traffic conditions. In this paper we present two alternative strategies for automatically joining a vehicle to a driving platoon. Special emphasis is laid on comfortable manoeuvres and a smooth transition of the controller into the platoon driving mode. The efficiency of these strategies is demonstrated by simulation results.