  This work proposes provably-correct self-organizing strategies for platoons
of heterogeneous vehicles. We refer to self-organization as the capability of a
platoon to autonomously homogenize to a common group behavior. We show that
self-organization promotes resilience to acceleration limits and communication
failures, i.e., homogenizing to a common group behavior makes the platoon
recover from these causes of impairments. In the presence of acceleration
limits, resilience is achieved by self-organizing to a common constrained group
behavior that prevents the vehicles from hitting their acceleration limits. In
the presence of communication failures, resilience is achieved by
self-organizing to a common group observer to estimate the missing information.
Stability of the self-organization mechanism is studied analytically, and
correctness with respect to traffic actions (e.g. emergency braking, cut-in,
merging) is realized through a provably-correct safety layer. Numerical
validations via the platooning toolbox OpenCDA in CARLA and via the CommonRoad
platform confirm improved performance through self-organization and the
provably-correct safety layer.
