Formal verification of autonomous vehicle platooning

• Published in: Science of computer programming Vol. 148; pp. 88 - 106
• Main Authors: Kamali, Maryam, Dennis, Louise A., McAree, Owen, Fisher, Michael, Veres, Sandor M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 15.11.2017
• Subjects: Agent programming; Model checking; Vehicle platooning; Agent programming; Model checking; Vehicle platooning
• ISSN: 0167-6423; 1872-7964
• DOI: 10.1016/j.scico.2017.05.006

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 behaviours of the vehicles in these platoons must be certified. This is non-trivial and goes beyond current certification requirements, for human-controlled vehicles, in that these vehicles can act autonomously. In this paper, we show how formal verification can contribute to the analysis of these new, and increasingly autonomous, systems. An appropriate overall 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 individual agent's code does not scale to the full system, and as the global system 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. •A combined methodology for the formal verification of autonomous automotive platooning is proposed.•Program model-checking is applied for verification of the “actual” agent code used in the implementation of platooning.•A model of the agent code is extracted and used for the verification of real-time properties for the system.