Safe and secure control of swarms of vehicles by small-world theory

The present paper investigates a new paradigm to control a swarm of moving individual vehicles, based on the introduction of a few random long-range communications in a queue dominated by short-range car-following dynamics. The theoretical approach adapts the small-world theory, originally proposed in social sciences, to the investigation of these networks. It is shown that the controlled system exhibits properties of higher synchronization and robustness with respect to communication failures. The considered application to a vehicle swarm shows how safety and security of the related traffic dynamics are strongly increased, diminishing the collision probability even in the presence of a hacker attack to some connectivity channels.