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1. Exploring Safety–Stability Tradeoffs in Cooperative CAV Platoon Controls with Bidirectional Impacts

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s24051614  

   Wei, Yu; He, Xiaozheng (March 2024, Sensors)

   Advanced sensing technologies and communication capabilities of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) empower them to capture the dynamics of surrounding vehicles, including speeds and positions of those behind, enabling judicious responsive maneuvers. The acquired dynamics information of vehicles spurred the development of various cooperative platoon controls, particularly designed to enhance platoon stability with reduced spacing for reliable roadway capacity increase. These controls leverage abundant information transmitted through various communication topologies. Despite these advancements, the impact of different vehicle dynamics information on platoon safety remains underexplored, as current research predominantly focuses on stability analysis. This knowledge gap highlights the critical need for further investigation into how diverse vehicle dynamics information influences platoon safety. To address this gap, this research introduces a novel framework based on the concept of phase shift, aiming to scrutinize the tradeoffs between the safety and stability of CAV platoons formed upon bidirectional information flow topology. Our investigation focuses on platoon controls built upon bidirectional information flow topologies using diverse dynamics information of vehicles. Our research findings emphasize that the integration of various types of information into CAV platoon controls does not universally yield benefits. Specifically, incorporating spacing information can enhance both platoon safety and string stability. In contrast, velocity difference information can improve either safety or string stability, but not both simultaneously. These findings offer valuable insights into the formulation of CAV platoon control principles built upon diverse communication topologies. This research contributes a nuanced understanding of the intricate interplay between safety and stability in CAV platoons, emphasizing the importance of information dynamics in shaping effective control strategies. 

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2. Adaptive Vehicle Platooning with Joint Network-Traffic Approach

   https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOBECOM46510.2021.9685116  

   Mahabal, Chinmay; Fang, Hua; Wang, Honggang; Yang, Qing (December 2021, 2021 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM))

   The Intelligent Transportation System has become one of the most globally researched topics, with Connected and Autonomous Vehicles(CAV) at its core. The CAV applications can be improved by the study of vehicle platooning immune to realtime traffic and vehicular network losses. In this work, we explore the need to integrate the Network model and Platooning system model for highway environments. The proposed platoon model is designed to be adaptive in length, providing the node vehicles to merge and exit. This overcomes the assumption that all the platoon nodes should have a common source and destination. The challenges of the existing platoon model, such as relay selection, acceleration threshold, are addressed for highly modular platoon design. The presented algorithm for merge and exit events optimizes the trade-off between network parameters such as communication range and vehicle dynamic parameters such as velocity and acceleration threshold. It considers the network bounds like SINR and link stability and vehicle trajectory parameters like the duration of the vehicle in the platoon. This optimizes the traffic throughput while maintaining stability using the PID controller. The work tries to increase the vehicle inclusion time in the platoon while preserving the overall traffic throughput. 

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3. REPLACE: Real-time Security Assurance in Vehicular Platoons Against V2V Attacks

   Boddupalli, S; Hegde, A; Ray, S. (January 2021, 24th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation (ITSC 2021))

   null (Ed.)

   Connected Autonomous Vehicular (CAV) platoon refers to a group of vehicles that coordinate their movements and operate as a single unit. The vehicle at the head acts as the leader of the platoon and determines the course of the vehicles following it. The follower vehicles utilize Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication and automated driving support systems to automatically maintain a small fixed distance between each other. Reliance on V2V communication exposes platoons to several possible malicious attacks which can compromise the safety, stability, and efficiency of the vehicles. We present a novel distributed resiliency architecture, RePLACe for CAV platoon vehicles to defend against adversaries corrupting V2V communication reporting preceding vehicle position. RePLACe is unique in that it can provide real-time defense against a spectrum of communication attacks. RePLACe provides systematic augmentation of a platoon controller architecture with real-time detection and mitigation functionality using machine learning. Unlike computationally intensive cryptographic solutions RePLACe accounts for the limited computation capabilities provided by automotive platforms as well as the real-time requirements of the application. Furthermore, unlike control-theoretic approaches, the same framework works against the broad spectrum of attacks. We also develop a systematic approach for evaluation of resiliency of CAV applications against V2V attacks. We perform extensive experimental evaluation to demonstrate the efficacy of RePLACe. 

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4. Vibration-Theoretic Approach to Vulnerability Analysis of Nonlinear Vehicle Platoons

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2023.3278574  

   Wang, Pengcheng; Wu, Xinkai; He, Xiaozheng (October 2023, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems)

   This research explores the inherent vulnerability of nonlinear vehicle platoons characterized by the oscillatory behavior triggered by external perturbations. The perturbation exerted on the vehicle platoon is regarded as an external force on an object. Following the mechanical vibration analysis in mechanics, this research proposes a vibration-theoretic approach that advances our understanding of platoon vulnerability from two aspects. First, the proposed approach introduces damping intensity to characterize vehicular platoon vulnerability, which divides platoon oscillations into two types, i.e., underdamped and overdamped. The damping intensity measures the platoon’s recovery strength in responding to perturbations. Second, the proposed approach can obtain the resonance frequency of a nonlinear vehicle platoon, where resonance amplifies platoon oscillation magnitude when the external perturbation frequency equals the platoon’s damping oscillation frequency. The main contribution of this research lies in the analytical derivation of the closed-form formulas of damping intensity and resonance frequency. In particular, the proposed approach formulates platoon dynamics under perturbation as a second-order non-homogeneous ordinary differential equation, enabling rigorous derivations and analyses for platoons with complicated nonlinear car-following behaviors. Through simulations built on real-world data, this paper demonstrates that an overdamped vehicle platoon is more robust against perturbations, and an underdamped platoon can be destabilized easily by exerting a perturbation at the platoon’s resonance frequency. The theoretical derivations and simulation results shed light on the design of reliable platooning control, either for human-driven or automated vehicles, to suppress the adverse effects of oscillations. 

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5. Incentive Mechanism for Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Routing Using Secure Multi-Party Computation and Blockchain

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s24020542  

   Wang, Chaojie; Peeta, Srinivas (January 2024, Sensors)

   Traffic congestion results from the spatio-temporal imbalance of demand and supply. With the advances in connected technologies, incentive mechanisms for collaborative routing have the potential to provide behavior-consistent solutions to traffic congestion. However, such mechanisms raise privacy concerns due to their information-sharing and execution-validation procedures. This study leverages secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) and blockchain technologies to propose a privacy-preserving incentive mechanism for collaborative routing in a vehicle-to-everything (V2X) context, which consists of a collaborative routing scheme and a route validation scheme. In the collaborative routing scheme, sensitive information is shared through an off-chain MPC protocol for route updating and incentive computation. The incentives are then temporarily frozen in a series of cascading multi-signature wallets in case vehicles behave dishonestly or roadside units (RSUs) are hacked. The route validation scheme requires vehicles to create position proofs at checkpoints along their selected routes with the assistance of witness vehicles using an off-chain threshold signature protocol. RSUs will validate the position proofs, store them on the blockchain, and unfreeze the associated incentives. The privacy and security analysis illustrates the scheme’s efficacy. Numerical studies reveal that the proposed incentive mechanism with tuned parameters is both efficient and implementable. 

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