Modular Verification of Vehicle Platooning with Respect to Decisions, Space and Time

The spread of autonomous systems into safety-critical areas has increased the demand for their formal verification, not only due to stronger certification requirements but also to public uncertainty over these new technologies. However, the complex nature of such systems, for example, the intricate combination of discrete and continuous aspects, ensures that whole system verification is often infeasible. This motivates the need for novel analysis approaches that modularise the problem, allowing us to restrict our analysis to one particular aspect of the system while abstracting away from others. For instance, while verifying the real-time properties of an autonomous system we might hide the details of the internal decision-making components. In this paper we describe verification of a range of properties across distinct dimesnions on a practical hybrid agent architecture. This allows us to verify the autonomous decision-making, real-time aspects, and spatial aspects of an autonomous vehicle platooning system. This modular approach also illustrates how both algorithmic and deductive verification techniques can be applied for the analysis of different system subcomponents.

Proceedings First Workshop on Formal Verification of Autonomous Vehicles

These are the proceedings of the workshop on Formal Verification of Autonomous Vehicles, held on September 19th, 2017 in Turin, Italy, as an affiliated workshop of the International Conference on integrated Formal Methods (iFM 2017). The workshop aim is to bring together researchers from the formal verification community that are developing formal methods for autonomous vehicles as well as researchers working, e.g., in the area of control theory or robotics, interested in applying verification techniques for designing and developing of autonomous vehicles.

Formal Verification of Autonomous Vehicle Platooning

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 new autonomous behaviors of the vehicles in these platoons must be certified. An appropriate 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 agent code does not scale to the full system and as the global verification technique does not capture the essential verification of autonomous behavior, 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.