Ênio Filho successfully defended his PhD dissertation on "An Evaluation Framework for Safe Cooperative Vehicle Platooning"

Enio Prates Vasconcelos Filho successfully defended his PhD thesis, supervised by Eduardo Tovar, and co-supervised by Anis Koubaa and Luis Almeida, at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal.

His thesis entitled "An Evaluation Framework for Safe Cooperative Vehicle Platooning" presents a framework named CopaDrive, aimed at vehicular applications capable of realistically simulating control and communication models. Based on ROS, this framework allows solutions to be developed and validated faster and more efficiently than current models. Its design is composed of the simulation tool, Hardware in the Loop, and the Robotica testbed. Starting from the use case of a Cooperative Vehicle Platooning (Co-VP) system, using this tool, it was possible to present a control solution capable of increasing the size of the platooning, increasing the safety of the maneuvers performed. Furthermore, it was possible to show the efficiency of modifying the message-sending triggers based on the ETSI ITS-G5 communication model.

The PhD examination committee was composed of Prof. Rahul Mangharam, from University of Pennsylvania, USA; Prof. António Casimiro Ferreira da Costa, Departamento de Informática da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Prof. Joaquim José de Castro Ferreira, Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda da Universidade de Aveiro and Prof. Paulo José Lopes Machado Portugal, Departamento de Engenharia Eletrotécnica e de Computadores da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto. It was chaired by Prof. José Nuno Moura Marques Fidalgo, Full Professor of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.