Unlocking the Potential of C-ITS Data for the Deployment of Traffic Management Systems

The growing dependence on private vehicular transportation and the escalating impacts of climate change exacerbate issues on road safety, such as increased accident rates and the degradation of road infrastructure. To address this, the faster deployment of new intelligent services and the digitization of road environments is being encouraged by public authorities, as Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) message dissemination to road users and traffic analysis can help mitigate the constraints inherent in the prevailing transportation paradigm. This paper presents a cloud-based framework integrated within a publicly available Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) system, for traffic monitoring and analysis. The proposed system leverages existing V2X communications, namely Collective Perception Messages (CPMs) generated by radar-equipped Road-Side Units (RSUs), to estimate traffic flows in a Smart City environment. The obtained results prove the feasibility of the devised solution, with error rates smaller than 10%, for assessing the number of vehicles crossing certain reference points on both urban and highway scenarios.