Risk of Cascading Failures in Time-Delayed Vehicle Platooning

Abstract: We develop a systemic risk framework to explore cascading systemic failures in networked control systems. A time-delayed version of the vehicle platooning problem is used as a benchmark to study the interplay among network connectivity, system dynamics, physical limitations, and uncertainty onto the possibility of cascading failure phenomena. The measure of value-at-risk is employed to investigate the domino effect of failures among pairs of vehicles within the platoon. The systemic risk framework is suitably extended to quantify the robustness of cascading failures via a novel manipulation of bi-variate distribution. We establish closed-form risk formulas that explain the effect of network parameters (e.g., Laplacian eigen-spectrum, time delay), noise statistics, and systemic event sets onto the cascading failures. Our findings can be applied to the design of robust platoons to lower the cascading risk. We support our theoretical results with extensive simulations.