Provably Correct Safety Protocol for Cooperative Platooning

Cooperative platooning is a promising method for improving energy efficiency and traffic throughput on interstates. Ensuring collision avoidance is particularly difficult in platooning due to the small desired inter-vehicle spacing. We propose a safety protocol that can be applied to arbitrary controllers in platooning to prevent collisions in a provably correct manner while still realizing a small distance to the preceding vehicle. Our protocol intervenes as rarely and smoothly as possible, and its safety is ensured even if communication fails. In addition, we propose a safety protocol for consensus techniques where the vehicles of the platoon successively agree on a common braking limit. Our safety protocols are evaluated on various scenarios using the CommonRoad benchmark suite.