Formal verification of the on-the-fly vehicle platooning protocol

Paper in proceeding, 2016

Future transportation systems are expected to be Systems of Systems (SoSs) composed of vehicles, pedestrians, roads, signs and other parts of the infrastructure. The boundaries of such systems change frequently and unpredictably and they have to cope with different degrees of uncertainty. At the same time, these systems are expected to function correctly and reliably. This is why designing for resilience is becoming extremely important for these systems. One example of SoS collaboration is the vehicle platooning, a promising concept that will help us dealing with traffic congestion in the near future. Before deploying such scenarios on real roads, vehicles must be guaranteed to act safely, hence their behaviour must be verified. In this paper, we describe a vehicle platooning protocol focusing especially on dynamic leader negotiation and message propagation. We have represented the vehicles behaviours with timed automata so that we are able to formally verifying the correctness through the use of model checking.