Automatically proving the correctness of vehicle coordination

In the next generation of road-based transportation systems, where vehicles exchange information and coordinate their actions, a major challenge will be to ensure that the interaction rules are safe and lead to progress. In this paper we address the problem of automatically verifying the correctness of such distributed vehicular coordination protocols. We propose a novel modeling approach for communicating mobile entities based on the concept of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). We apply this method to an intersection collision avoidance protocol and show how the method can be used to investigate the settings under which such a protocol achieves safety and progress.