Letter to the Editor—A Mathematical Model for Platoon Formation

Under single-lane no-passing conditions it may be assumed that a vehicle's actual speed s_i is given by s_i = min[v₁, v₂, …, v_i], where the v_j represent the desired speeds of the vehicles ahead. If the desired speeds are assumed to be identically distributed random variables then several properties of the resulting platoon structures are independent of the particular density function. Several of these results are presented.