Engineering Collectives of Self-driving Vehicles: The SOTA Approach

Future cities will be populated by myriads of autonomous self-driving vehicles. Although individual vehicles have their own goals to pursue in autonomy, they may also be part of a collective of vehicles, as in the case of a fleet of vehicles of a car sharing company. Accordingly, they may also be required to act in a coordinated way towards the achievement of specific collective goals, or to meet specific city-level objectives. This raises the issue of properly engineering the behavior of such collective of vehicles, by properly capturing their collective requirements also in consideration of their individual goals, and understanding which knowledge about the state of the collective they must be provided with. In this context, this paper shows how the SOTA model can be a very effective tool to support the engineering of self-driving vehicle collectives. SOTA, by bringing together the lessons of goal-oriented requirements engineering, context-aware systems, and dynamical systems modeling, has indeed the potential for acting as a general reference model to help tackle some key issues in the design and development of complex collective systems immersed in dynamic environments, as collectives of self-driving vehicles are.