VerifCar: a framework for modeling and model checking communicating autonomous vehicles

This paper presents a framework, called VerifCar, devoted to the validation of decision policies of communicating autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The approach focuses on the formal modeling of CAVs by means of timed automata, allowing a formal and exhaustive analysis of the behaviors of vehicles. VerifCar supports a parametric modeling of CAV systems as a network of timed automata tailored for verification and limiting the well-known state space explosion. As an illustration, VerifCar is applied to check robustness and efficiency, as well as to asses the impact of communication delays on the decision algorithms of CAVs, on well chosen case studies representing real-life critical situations.