A Distributed Protocol for Motion Coordination in Free-Range Vehicular Systems

Abstract This paper extends the RAS-based approach to conflict resolution in multi-vehicle systems presented in Reveliotis and Roszkowska (2008). Similar to that earlier work, the employed model assumes the tesselation of the motion space into cells, which constitute the set of resources shared by the system agents. The key difference in the proposed abstraction is the admission of up to two agents in a single cell at a time, instead of only one, that was assumed earlier. This changes dramatically the complexity of the state-safety problem, from computationally hard to easy, and allows the effective deployment of a maximally permissive control scheme for the coordination of the agents’ motion, as well as the implementation of this scheme in the form of a distributed protocol.