Formal Verification of Autonomous Vehicle Platooning

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 behaviours of the vehicles in these platoons must be certified. An appropriate representation for vehicle platooning is as a multiagent 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 behaviour, 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.