Cooperative Path Planning for Heterogeneous Agents

Abstract

Cooperation among different vehicles is a promising concept for route planning of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). For instance, vehicle platooning on highways decreases fuel consumption because it reduces the air resistance and several trucks cooperate with each other when planning. Traditional platooning, however, cannot model cooperation among different types of vehicles because it assumes the homogeneity of vehicle types. We study a model that permits heterogeneous cooperation and discuss a route optimization problem under assumption that the heterogeneous cooperation benefits the objective function. We experimentally evaluate the formulation through using synthetic and real graphs based on a modern integer programming solver with various parameter settings, which are not tried in previous studies. We also compare the results by the solves with simple heuristic method developed in this paper and discuss the results to reveal the properties of the optimization problem with heterogeneous vehicle types.