  Platooning is a way to significantly reduce fuel consumption of trucks.
Vehicles that drive at close inter-vehicle distance assisted by automatic
controllers experience substantially lower air-drag. In this paper, we deal
with the problem of coordinating the formation and the breakup of platoons in a
fuel-optimal way. We formulate an optimization problem which accounts for
routing, speed-dependent fuel consumption, and platooning decisions. An
algorithm to obtain an approximate solution to the problem is presented. It
first determines the shortest path for each truck. Then, possible platoon
configurations are identified. For a certain platoon configuration the optimal
speed profile is the solution to a convex program. The algorithm is illustrated
by a realistic example.
