A multiple stack architecture for intelligent vehicles

We present a general architecture for intelligent vehicles, especially collaborative driving applications. Intelligent vehicles are similar to communication networks as both types of systems interact with physical world using devices that are rapidly evolving, while intelligent vehicles are more complicated than communication network because they interact with the physical world in not only, one but several ways, and because many of the interactions have severe time constraints. The proposed architecture adopts multiple layered stack structures to address the issues. We also present a collaborative merge protocol as an instantiation of the proposed architecture, and discuss the advantage of the architecture in terms of the feasibility of model checking and conformance testing.