Evaluation of safety indicators for truck platooning

This paper addresses safety indicators for truck platooning at short inter-vehicle distances (with a time gap of 0.5 s). The aim of a safety indicator is to determine the correct moment for initiating a Collision Avoidance brake action to prevent a collision with the preceding truck in threatening situations. Three safety indicators are selected for an evaluation: the intended acceleration of the preceding truck, which is shared via Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, the Brake Threat Number (BTN — based on simple vehicle models and an emergency brake assumption of the lead), and the Time-To-Collision (TTC — based on a constant velocity assumption). The latter two do not rely on V2V communication, but are obtained via on-board signals. Requirements for the amount of false negatives (missing a threatening situation) and the false positives (identifying a safe situation as threatening) are derived from a functional safety perspective. To find thresholds for the safety indicators that minimize the false negative rate, emergency brake tests are used. To evaluate the number of false positives, a set of data of two trucks driving in a platoon at 0.5 s at mixed-traffic highways in Belgium and the Netherlands, collected during 8 hours of automated driving in a platoon, is used. The results indicate that the communicated intended acceleration of the preceding truck might be able to distinguish safe and threatening situations in a vehicle platoon. Furthermore, for situations without V2V, both the BTN and the TTC are not capable to distinguish between threatening and safe situations. The amount of false positives found in the safe driving data-set does not fulfill the requirements derived from functional safety perspective.