Automatic Incident Detection in Intelligent Transportation Systems Using Aggregation of Traffic Parameters Collected Through V2I Communications

Recent research in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) focuses on Automatic Incident Detection (AID) techniques. Using advances in wireless networking and sensor technologies, modern vehicles have the ability to communicate with each other as well as with roadside infrastructure units (RSUs) in order to increase road safety. These new innovations in transportation technology provide traffic management system the ability to use data collected from the vehicles on the road to detect congestion and traffic incidents. Lately, many techniques were developed to alert drivers in advance about traffic incidents and to enable them to avoid congestion. In this paper, we discuss probabilistic collection of traffic data through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications and present two novel techniques for automatic detection of traffic incidents in a highway scenario that are based on the use of distance and time for changing lanes, respectively vehicle speed changes over time. The proposed methods, which are illustrated with numerical results obtained from simulations, outperform alternative AID techniques through higher incident detection rates, about 25% shorter peak queue values and 20% faster dissipation of roadway congestion.