Scenario‐Based Platoon Lane Network Design

A truck platoon is a set of trucks that drive behind one another at short headways to save fuel, reduce emissions, and improve traffic throughput. Despite the potential benefits of platooning, road operators have raised concerns about the impact of platoons on surrounding traffic. The use of dedicated platoon lanes helps prevent potentially dangerous situations when interacting with regular traffic. Furthermore, dedicated platooning lanes can help increase platooning benefits and prolong the life of infrastructure. Such types of infrastructure design decisions typically have to be made when the demand that the infrastructure needs to support is uncertain. One way to represent uncertain demand in optimization models is by means of possible realizations or scenarios. Using many scenarios is likely to produce better solutions, but it also creates computational challenges. We propose an approach that blends solutions, each obtained using an optimization model with relatively few scenarios. We use this approach in the context of locating dedicated truck platoon lanes. Computational experiments show that blending designs obtained with a few scenarios is as effective, but much more efficient, as creating a design using many scenarios.