A Secure Adaptive Control for Cooperative Driving of Autonomous Connected Vehicles in the Presence of Heterogeneous Communication Delays and Cyberattacks

The development of autonomous connected vehicles, moving as a platoon formation, is a hot topic in the intelligent transportation system (ITS) research field. It is on the road and deployment requires the design of distributed control strategies, leveraging secure vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Indeed, wireless communication networks can be affected by various security vulnerabilities and cyberattacks leading to dangerous implications for cooperative driving safety. Control design can play an important role in providing both resilience and robustness to vehicular networks. To this aim, in this article, we tackle and solve the problem of cyber-secure tracking for a platoon that moves as a cohesive formation along a single lane undergoing different kinds of cyber threats, that is, application layer and network layer attacks, as well as network induced phenomena. The proposed cooperative approach leverages an adaptive synchronization-based control algorithm that embeds a distributed mitigation mechanism of malicious information. The closed-loop stability is analytically demonstrated by using the Lyapunov–Krasovskii theory, while its effectiveness in coping with the most relevant type of cyber threats is disclosed by using PLEXE, a high fidelity simulator which provides a realistic simulation of cooperative driving systems.