Mechanisms for a reliable cooperation of vehicles

The final objective of the described project is to develop and implement techniques for a reliable cooperation of autonomous mobile systems that can be used for future traffic management systems. The approach relies on the ability of the systems to communicate among themselves in order to make efficient use of available shared resources (e.g. road space). In the context of automotives this means that computer-based driving assistants not only support humans in handling their own vehicles but also in interacting with the individual vehicles in the neighborhood The vision is an embedded, distributed traffic control system that is provided by the cooperation of the participating units, and thus is more robust and scalable than centralized approaches. Besides the 'obvious' requirements on high assurance computing in traffic control systems, the design and implementation of such systems require the ability of coordination while obeying the necessary real-time and safety constraints. This paper motivates the approach, presents an envisaged system architecture and sketches the design of the basic communication layers of this architecture that can fulfill the realtime and safety requirements. Finally, it introduces a lab-scale evaluation and demonstration scenario that proves the feasibility of the concepts