A Cooperative Approach to Traffic Congestion Detection With Complex Event Processing and VANET

Currently, distributed traffic information systems have come up as one of the most important approaches for detecting traffic flow problems on a road. For that purpose, they usually make use of the location information that vehicles share among them through periodical messages that are transmitted across a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). This paper puts forward an event-driven architecture (EDA) as a novel mechanism to get insight into VANET messages to detect different levels of traffic jams; furthermore, it also takes into account environmental data that come from external data sources, such as weather conditions. The proposed EDA has been developed through the complex-event-processing technology. Simulation tests show that the proposed mechanism can detect traffic congestions, which involve different numbers of lanes and lengths with short delay.