Towards a safety mechanism for platooning

Platooning has shown to be technically feasible, but safety aspects are still challenging. Wireless communication between vehicles allows to maintain reduced inter-vehicle distances, thereby improving traffic throughput and decreasing fuel consumption. As the driver can no longer be a backup at short inter-vehicle distances, the system needs to be fail-safe for both hazardous traffic situations as well as failures. In this paper, a scenario is defined which combines a hazardous traffic situation with a communication failure. First, the methodology for developing safety related functionality in automated driving is presented. This methodology combines aspects of the ISO26262 standard with the Harmony profile. Second, the safety mechanism to avoid a collision by braking is described. This ensures that a safe state can be reached for a set of use cases which are derived from the defined scenario. Finally, the proposed solution is tested in a simulation environment and is also implemented on test vehicles. The result of the simulations and experiments demonstrate the practical validity and show increased safety related functionality.