| Summary: | Vehicle Platooning has emerged in recent years as a promising method to reducethe fuel consumption of heavy trucks in long-distance transportation. Platoon-ing lowers the fuel consumption by forming strings of vehicles driving very closebehind each other, thus reducing the air drag. However, in order to form aplatoon, vehicles have to follow a common route. As vehicles are scattered overa road network, some sort of high-level coordination and route planning is re-quired to unlock the full potential of this technique. In this thesis, we evaluatevarious methods to minimize the total fuel consumption of a large-scale systemby guiding vehicles to fuel-ecient paths.We develop a comprehensive mathematical formulation of the problem andpresent a global solution approach to the problem. The approach is implementedand the investigation of the fuel reduction potential shows promising results.However, an exponential increase in computational complexity makes it unsuitedfor problems involving more than 20 trucks, even on small road networks.As a consequence, we then promote a locally distributed approach whichis able to eciently solve large problems. We implement such a distributedalgorithm and run large simulations on a model of the German autobahn roadnetwork. Results show that signicant savings can be achieved for even a fewhundred vehicles. We also investigate the in uence of the number of trucks onthe total fuel savings and examine the eect of limiting the maximum traveltime of trucks.
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