Safety Verification for Automated Vehicle Maneuvers

In this thesis we formally model a system consisting of two vehicles moving along a single track, plus controllers that operate the vehicles, plus communication channels. The modeling formalism used is the Hybrid Automata model developed by Lynch, Segala, Vaandrager and Weinberg. We formulate a key safety requirement of such a system, namely, that the two vehicles never collide at a relative velocity greater than a given bound, vaLow. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the controller of the follower vehicle to guarantee that the safety requirement is satisfied regardless of the behavior of the leading vehicle. The model includes handling of communication delays and uncertainty. The proofs use composition, invariants, and levels of abstraction, together with methods of mathematical analysis. This case study is derived from the California PATH intelligent highway project. Thesis Supervisor: Nancy A. Lynch Title: NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering