Early Gapping and Platoon Merging Strategies for Autonomous Vehicles using Local Controllers

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper could be contributed to the basic concept for future  platoon merging for autonomous vehicles related studies. However, typos and error message such as "Error! Reference source not found." should be fixed.

Author Response

Thank you for the review and support

indeed, during the conversion process, the automatic cross-reference to figures numbers have broken. we fixed it in the revised version and hope it is clear now.

Reviewer 2 Report

English need to be improved, see abstract 3rd last line.

Research is supported with mostly old references, suggestion is to update references with some recent references

"Error reference source not found"...please recheck formatting

Proposed method seems to have high computational cost , it is suggested to add some paragraph about some limitation of research work and future direction

Author Response

Thank you for the review and support

The revised manuscript went into additional English proofreading. In addition, some broken cross-references were fixed. References were updated to reflect up-to-date recent references.  

We addressed the issue of computational cost in the discussion. As the RSU's we suggest in this paper convey a predefined profile, the computation costs are irrelevant here. Nevertheless, this is not the case if one wishes to optimize a road network. Indeed, in that case, the computational cost of a gap profile optimization should be carefully considered. We added this in the 'conclusions' section.

Reviewer 3 Report

It is a study related to the confluence where AV suffers the most. 

A Gap Profile Method that supports the movement of autonomous vehicles within a limited simulation environment, including game theory, was presented. 

Although there are limitations in implementing the environment and simulation environment consisting of 100% AV vehicles, it is judged that the meaning of this study can be found in that it is a study that considers the road environment in the future. 

In the actual environment, results may be different from the research results, but research initiated under a limited environment is essential. From this point of view, it is of sufficient value when looking at the academic meaning of this study. 

In the model equation, it is judged that it is necessary to explain and specify each variable, and to organize the form for the reference.

Author Response

Thank you for the review and support

The revised manuscript went into additional English proofreading. In addition, some broken cross-references were fixed. References were updated to reflect up-to-date recent references.  

The paper assumes 100% AV. This is a far-fetched future. In future work, it will be interesting to study the impact of the strategy under market mixes of AV and regular vehicles. Following the reviewer’s suggestion, the issue of a mixed vehicle environment was further discussed in the conclusion section.

Following the reviewer’s suggestion and to ease reading, we added some reminders in the text body as to the variables' definitions in the model equations (in addition to the definitions available in table 1).