Safe platooning in automated highway systems part I: Safety regions design

xThis paper addresses the problem of designing safe controllers for vehicle manuevering in Automated Highway Systems (AHS) in which traffic is organiz ed into platoons of closely spaced vehicles. Conditions to achieve safe pla tooning under normal modes of operation are investigated. The notion of saf ety is related with the absence of collisions that exceed a given relative velocity threshold. State dependent safety regions for the platoons are des igned in such a way that, whenever the state of a platoon is inside these s afety regions, it is guaranteed that platoon maneuvering will be safe and f ollow the behavior prescribed by the finite state machines that control veh icles manuevers. It is shown that it is possible to design control laws tha t keep the state of the platoons inside these safety regions. The results o btained allow one to decouple the controllers for the regulation of the man uevers and the finite state machines that determine their proper sequence i n AHS architectures. The overall complexity of the design and verification of the AHS as an hybrid system is therefore greatly reduced.