The Fail-Safe Operation of Collaborative Driving Systems

Abstract

We consider the problem of collaborative driving systems in which the vehicles share sensor information and make joint decisions on vehicle control. Such system involves vehicular control, communications links and environment sensing. We propose a multiple stack architecture that is based on the nature of collaborative driving systems. The architecture facilitates the design, implementation, verification and testing of collaborative driving protocol. The advantage of using absolute time in a distributed system is also demonstrated. Specifically, we propose a merge protocol that assists a driver in merging with other vehicles based on the proposed architecture. We create a lock protocol and specify it as an extended finite state machine as a subroutine of the merge protocol. Absolute time simplifies a deadlock-free lock protocol. The lock protocol is verified using probabilistic verification.