  In this paper we propose a distributed model predictive control architecture
to coordinate the longitudinal motion of a vehicle platoon at a signalized
intersection. Our control approach is cooperative; we use vehicle-to-vehicle
(V2V) communication in order to maintain small inter-vehicle distances and
correspondingly achieve large vehicle throughput at an intersection. We study
the trade-off between safety and road throughput for this problem. In
particular, we present the link between traffic efficiency gains in terms of
throughput, and safety of the connected platoon measured as trust on the
predicted speed profile of other vehicles in the network.
