  Vehicles are becoming connected entities. As a result, a likely scenario is
that such entities might be literally bombarded with information from a
multitude of devices. In this context, a key challenging requirement for both
connected and autonomous vehicles is that they will need to become cognitive
bodies, able to parse information and use only the pieces of information that
are relevant to the vehicle in the context of a given journey. In order to
address this fundamental requirement, a decision engine is presented in this
paper. The engine makes it possible for the vehicle to understand which pieces
of information are really relevant, and subsequently to process only those
pieces of information. In order to illustrate the key features of our system,
we show that it is possible to build upon the engine to develop a distributed
traffic management system, and then we validate such a system via both
conventional (numerical and SUMO-based) simulations and a Hardware-in-the-Loop
(HIL) platform. Both the conventional simulations and the HIL validation showed
that the engine can be effectively used to design a distributed traffic
management system.
