  Achieving safety is a critical aspect of attaining autonomy in a platoon of
autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we propose a distributionally robust risk
framework to investigate cascading failures in platoons. To examine the impact
of network connectivity and system dynamics on the emergence of cascading
failures, we consider a time-delayed network model of the platoon of vehicles
as a benchmark. To study the cascading effects among pairs of vehicles in the
platoon, we use the measure of conditional distributionally robust functional.
We extend the risk framework to quantify cascading failures by utilizing a
bi-variate normal distribution. Our work establishes closed-form risk formulas
that illustrate the effects of time-delay, noise statistics, underlying
communication graph, and sets of soft failures. The insights gained from our
research can be applied to design safe platoons that are robust to the risk of
cascading failures. We validate our results through extensive simulations.
