Model-Based Membership Verification in Vehicular Platoons

Abstract

Cooperative vehicular systems have the potential to significantly increase traffic efficiency and safety. However, they also raise the question of to what extent information that is received from other vehicles can be trusted. In this paper we present a novel approach for increasing the trustworthiness of cooperative driving through a model-based approach for verifying membership views in vehicular platoons. We define a formal model for platoon membership, cooperative awareness claims, and membership verification mechanisms. With the help of a satisfiability solver, we are able to quantitatively analyse the impact of different system parameters on the verifiability of received information. Our results demonstrate the importance of cross validating received messages, as well as the surprising difficulty in establishing correct membership views despite powerful verification mechanisms.