Introduction
The 25 vehicles platoon experiment was carried out on January 19, 2013 on a 3.2 km stretch of the Chuangxin Avenue in a suburban area in Hefei City, China. The experimental section and trajectories of vehicles measured by the GPS devices are shown in Fig. 1. There are no traffic lights on the road section. Since the road is located in a suburban area and has at least three lanes in each direction, there is no interference from other vehicles that are not part of the experiment.
High-precision GPS devices were installed on all of the vehicles to record their locations and velocities every 0.1 second. The measurement errors of the GPS devices were within ± 1 m for location and within ± 1 km/h for velocity. Once the experiment starts, the driver of the leading car is required to control the velocity of the car at certain pre-determined constant values. Other drivers in the experiment are required to drive their cars as they normally do, but overtaking is not allowed. When reaching the end of the road section, the car platoon decelerates, makes U-turn, and stops. When all the cars have stopped, a new run of the experiment begins. It is need to explain, due to the length limit of the road section, we only analyze the experiment data in which the speed of the leading car is below or equal to 50 km/h. When the leading car moves with speed larger than 50 km/h, the experimental data are too limited after removing the data belonging to the start process, the deceleration and U-turn process. One can see two typical examples of spatiotemporal diagrams below.
The speed of leading car is (a) 50 km/h, (b) 15 km/h.
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