Cooperative Awareness Messages’ Generation Frequencies, Trigger Distributions, and Pseudonym Changes of First Commercially Deployed Vehicles in Real Operating Scenarios

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems have been deployed in mass-produced vehicles in Europe (Golf 8, ID.3, etc.) since 2019, promising major improvements in vehicle safety, efficiency, and comfort. Equipped with Vehicle-to-X communication, the vehicles directly send information about their driving status to the environment. The data are already used for many Vehicle-to-X communication use-cases specified by the Car-2-Car Communication Consortium to achieve the above-mentioned improvements. This study focuses on using Vehicle-2-X communication and its messages for accident analysis. For this purpose, we investigated the advantage in temporal resolution of the continuously sent Cooperative Awareness Message compared to the Event-Data-Recorder for accident reconstruction in the pre-crash. A high resolution of the temporal accident scene is essential for the doubtless clarification of accidents. Therefore, we analyzed the generation frequencies and the trigger conditions of the Cooperative Awareness Message of vehicles available on the European market while driving in real traffic and during different parking maneuvers. Also, the pseudonym change was analyzed. We found that the average generation frequency of the Cooperative Awareness Message is higher than the 2.00 Hz recording frequency of the event data recorder for all scenarios investigated. Especially on rural roads and highways, the temporal resolution is advantageous. Since many serious accidents occur on rural roads, the use of Cooperative Awareness Messages could significantly benefit the reconstruction of the accident scene. Thus, we recommend increasing efforts to use the Cooperative Awareness Message as digital data for accident analysis and encourage more scientists to deal with this topic.