Chapter 14 - Implementation of a cooperative intelligent transport system utilizing weather and road observation data

Abstract

In recent times, the vehicle industry has started to equip vehicles with advanced technologies and features to provide communication connections to nearby vehicles and roadside infrastructure. This advanced technology in the domain of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs) is usually called Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS), and it is designed to improve road safety, comfort of drivers, transportation efficiency, and other factors. The advancement of C-ITS includes the use of different wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11, ITS-G5/DSRC (Dedicated short-range communications) and 4G/5G. In the C-ITS domain, researchers are not only working on passenger-based vehicles but also heavy vehicles, as well as autonomous cars. Heavy vehicles considerably contribute to the financial growth and return on invested capital (ROI). To make heavy vehicle systems safe and efficient, the C-ITS system needs to provide a platform offering different sets of pilot use-cases, where each use-case has a specific set of requirements. In this chapter, some of the critical pilot use-cases are examined, considering Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) scenarios by exploiting road traffic and weather data. Important constraints are also studied for C-ITS pilot use-cases to establish a comprehensive qualitative assessment of the ITS-G5 protocol stack. This chapter also evaluates the performance of ITS-G5 in an operational environment in various realistic pilot field measurements considering safety-critical messages (alerts). The collected results show that the implementation of the ITS-G5 protocol in real time offers a successful delivery of safety-critical messages (90%–99%) on frequency channels of 10MHz. Moreover, ITS-G5 transmits safety-critical messages having a low latency (<100ms) that meets the C-ITS standard for real-time operations. Discussed scenarios in this chapter are (a) road-work warning, (b) emergency vehicle, (c) road weather, (d) slow vehicle, and (e) hazard warning. The operational performance of these pilot scenarios makes this system highly suitable to exchange data packets by maintaining a reasonable distance, having low latency as well as the lost packets in V2V and V2I scenarios. This pilot platform has been designed and developed at the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), in Sodankylä, Finland. The overall operational presentation of the C-ITS pilot platform in real time makes the system suitable to be used not only for heavy vehicles but also for automobiles.