A formal approach to autonomous vehicle coordination

Abstract

Increasing demands on safety and energy e ciency will re- quire higher levels of automation in transportation systems. This in- volves dealing with safety-critical distributed coordination. In this paper we demonstrate how a Satis ability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver can be used to prove correctness of a vehicular coordination problem. We formalise a recent distributed coordination protocol and validate our ap- proach using an intersection collision avoidance (ICA) case study. The system model captures continuous time and space, and an unbounded number of vehicles and messages. The safety of the case study is auto- matically veri ed using the Z3 theorem prover.