Safe Platooning in Automated Highway Systems Part I: Safety Regions Design

This paper addresses the problem of designing safe controllers for vehicle manuevering in Automated Highway Systems (AHS) in which traffic is organized into platoons of closely spaced vehicles. Conditions to achieve safe platooning under normal modes of operation are investigated. The notion of safety is related with the absence of collisions that exceed a given relative velocity threshold. State dependent safety regions for the platoons are designed in such a way that, whenever the state of a platoon is inside these safety regions, it is guaranteed that platoon maneuvering will be safe and follow the behavior prescribed by the finite state machines that control vehicles manuevers. It is shown that it is possible to design control laws that keep the state of the platoons inside these safety regions. The results obtained allow one to decouple the controllers for the regulation of the manuevers and the finite state machines that determine their proper sequence in AHS architectures. The overall complexity of the design and verification of the AHS as an hybrid system is therefore greatly reduced.