Resilience in Platoons of Cooperative Heterogeneous Vehicles: Self-Organization Strategies and Provably-Correct Design

This work proposes provably-correct self-organizing strategies for platoons of heterogeneous vehicles. Self-organization is the capability to autonomously homogenize to a common group behavior. We show that self-organization keeps resilience to
acceleration limits
and
communication failures
, i.e., homogenizing to a common group behavior makes the platoon recover from these impairments. Adhering to acceleration limits is achieved by self-organizing to a common constrained group behavior that prevents reaching acceleration limits. In the presence of communication failures, resilience is achieved by self-organizing to a common group observer to estimate the missing information. Stability and string stability of the self-organization mechanism are studied analytically, and correctness with respect to traffic actions (e.g. emergency braking, cut-in, merging) is realized through a provably-correct safety layer. Numerical validations via the platooning toolbox OpenCDA in CARLA and via the CommonRoad platform confirm improved performance through self-organization and the provably-correct safety layer.