Provably-Correct Safety Protocol for Cooperative Platooning
This work addresses the critical safety problem in cooperative adaptive cruise control for vehicle platoons, ensuring collision avoidance with provable guarantees.
The paper proposes a provably-correct safety protocol for cooperative platooning that prevents collisions while maintaining small inter-vehicle distances, even under communication failures. The protocol is evaluated on the CommonRoad benchmark suite.
Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is a well-studied technology for forming string-stable vehicle platoons. Ensuring collision avoidance is particularly difficult in CACC due to the small desired inter-vehicle spacing. We propose a safety protocol preventing collisions in a provably-correct manner while still maintaining a small distance to the preceding vehicle, by utilizing communicated braking capabilities. In addition, the safety of the protocol is ensured despite possible communication failures. While our concept can be applied to any CACC system, we particularly consider a class of CACCs, where the platoon vehicles successively agree on a consensus behavior. Our safety protocol is evaluated on various scenarios using the CommonRoad benchmark suite.