• Road authorities can potentially benefit from platooning as the integration and uptake of the platooning functionality necessitates the digitization of vehicles and logistics. This potentially enables the road authorities to influence the parameters (like time gap, speed, allowed number of trucks in a platoon) according to which the trucks are driving on their pavements.
• In the current road situation at least 15% of all trucks could already benefit from platooning without having to change their behaviour. Trucks can find each other using a platoon matching service.
• Economic analysis has shown that for fleet owners there is only a direct business case for the PAF, mainly because of the expected impact on driver efficiency costs. For the platooning support function the potential benefits are more on a societal level, since it is expected to increase traffic safety, driver comfort (not assessed in the current study) and road capacity.
• The positive effect of truck platooning on road capacity increases when the percentage of trucks in the total traffic flow is high (around 20%).
• The PSF does not show an improvement in fuel consumption and emissions. This is because the PSF is following at 1,5 seconds or more, which is not significantly closer compared to the current driving situations on the roads. Looking at the PAF, with headways lower than 1 second, potential effects on fuel consumption and emissions are expected.
• When trucks platoons are relatively long, other road users will merge in between the platoon when entering the highway at a relatively low speed. To avoid dangerous situations the developed platooning system increases the gap when a cut-in vehicle is detected, but it is still advisable to avoid long platoons or to have larger time gaps in the vicinity of highway entries.
Following these conclusions, truck platooning is beneficial for road capacity and traffic flow. But truck platooning on road segments with a lot of highway entries also shows negative effects that can be mitigated by larger time gaps, limiting the platoon length and ramp metering in such areas. In this respect hub to hub platooning using dedicated (digital) infrastructure and platooning at night can be considered as a first potential viable use-case. PAF can strengthen this use case, eliminating part of the current driver shortage at night. Given the chosen approach to first develop the platooning technology/platform that can be deployed using the existing technology and under current legislation (the PSF), the PSF can bring potential safety benefits but cannot bring the expected economic benefits and impacts of platooning immediately after the project.
