Efficiency analysis of formally verified adaptive cruise controllers

We consider an adaptive cruise control system in which control decisions are made based on position and velocity information received from other vehicles via V2V wireless communication. If the vehicles follow each other at a close distance, they have better wireless reception but collisions may occur when a follower car does not receive notice about the decelerations of the leader car fast enough to react before it is too late. If the vehicles are farther apart, they would have a bigger safety margin, but the wireless communication drops out more often, so that the follower car no longer receives what the leader car is doing. In order to guarantee safety, such a system must return control to the driver if it does not receive an update from a nearby vehicle within some timeout period. The value of this timeout parameter encodes a tradeoff between the likelihood that an update is received and the maximum safe acceleration. Combining formal verification techniques for hybrid systems with a wireless communication model, we analyze how the expected efficiency of a provably-safe adaptive cruise control system is affected by the value of this timeout.