  This paper introduces the SEAD framework that simplifies the process of
designing and describing autonomous vehicle platooning manoeuvres. Although a
large body of research has been formulating platooning manoeuvres, it is still
challenging to design, describe, read, and understand them. This difficulty
largely arises from missing formalisation. To fill this gap, we analysed
existing ways of describing manoeuvres, derived the causes of difficulty, and
designed a framework that simplifies the manoeuvre design process. Alongside, a
Manoeuvre Design Language was developed to structurally describe manoeuvres in
a machine-readable format. Unlike state-of-the-art manoeuvre descriptions that
require one state machine for every participating vehicle, the SEAD framework
allows describing any manoeuvre from the single perspective of the platoon
leader. %As a proof of concept, the proposed framework was implemented in the
mixed traffic simulation environment BEHAVE for an autonomous highway scenario.
Using this framework, we implemented several manoeuvres as they were described
in literature. To demonstrate the applicability of the framework, an experiment
was performed to evaluate the execution time performance of multiple
alternatives of the Join-Middle manoeuvre. This proof-of-concept experiment
revealed that the manoeuvre execution time can be reduced by 28 \% through
parallelising various steps without considerable secondary effects. We hope
that the SEAD framework will pave the way for further research in the area of
new manoeuvre design and optimisation by largely simplifying and unifying
platooning manoeuvre representation.
