Formal Verification of Autonomous Vehicle Platooning
This addresses safety certification for autonomous vehicle platoons, which is crucial for deployment, but the approach is incremental as it combines existing verification techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of certifying safety in autonomous vehicle platoons by using a mixed formal verification strategy to verify safety requirements on actual agent code, achieving verification that scales and captures autonomous behavior.
The coordination of multiple autonomous vehicles into convoys or platoons is expected on our highways in the near future. However, before such platoons can be deployed, the new autonomous behaviors of the vehicles in these platoons must be certified. An appropriate representation for vehicle platooning is as a multi-agent system in which each agent captures the "autonomous decisions" carried out by each vehicle. In order to ensure that these autonomous decision-making agents in vehicle platoons never violate safety requirements, we use formal verification. However, as the formal verification technique used to verify the agent code does not scale to the full system and as the global verification technique does not capture the essential verification of autonomous behavior, we use a combination of the two approaches. This mixed strategy allows us to verify safety requirements not only of a model of the system, but of the actual agent code used to program the autonomous vehicles.