Modeling Concurrency and Reconfiguration in Vehicular Systems: A $π$-calculus Approach

As autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles are deployed on the roads, they will have to eventually start communicating with each other in order to achieve increased efficiency and safety. Current approaches in the control of collaborative vehicles primarily consider homogeneous simplified vehicle dynamics and usually ignore any communication issues. This raises an important question of how systems without the aforementioned limiting assumptions can be modeled, analyzed and certified for safe operation by both industry and governmental agencies. In this work, we propose a modeling framework where communication and system reconfiguration is modeled through $\pi$-calculus expressions while the closed-loop control systems are modeled through hybrid automata. We demonstrate how the framework can be utilized for modeling and simulation of platooning behaviors of heterogeneous vehicles.