Introducing connectivity and collaboration promises to address some of the safety challenges facing automated vehicles. This is especially the case for scenarios that suffer from the so-called information gap, where occlusions and rule violating road users pose safety risks, and challenges in reconciling performance and safety. 

Establishing new collaborative systems, encompassing connected vehicles, off-board perception systems and a communication network, can help to overcome the information gap, thus contributing to enhance traffic safety and performance. However, adding connectivity and information sharing not only requires infrastructure investments but also an improved understanding of the design space, the involved trade-offs and new failure modes. 

We set out to improve the understanding of the relationships between the constituents of a collaborative system to investigate design parameters influencing safety properties and their performance trade-offs. To this end we propose a methodology comprising models, analysis methods and a software tool that enables to explore the design space, the potential for safety enhancements, the corresponding requirements on off-board perception systems and the communication network, and tactical safety behaviors of connected automated vehicles. The methodology is instantiated in terms of a concrete set of models and a tool, exercised through a case study involving intersection traffic conflicts.    

We show how the age of information and measurement uncertainty affect the collaborative system design space and further discuss the generalization and other findings from both the methodology and case study development.