Towards experimental evaluation of intelligent Transportation System safety and traffic efficiency

Traffic efficiency and safety are major hallmarks of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). To accurately validate and investigate the effectiveness of traffic efficiency and safety application of ITSs, realistic studies are highly demanded [1]. In this paper, using real-world traffic and simulation data, we developed a realistic ITS test bed and a mobile application known as the Incident Warning Application (IWA) with the view of answering the following question: what is the traffic efficiency and safety benefits of Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications in a realistic ITS environment? Our real-world dataset consists of six weeks road traffic data of the Maryland (MD)/Washington DC and Virginia (VA) areas from August 8
^th
, 2012 to September 27
^th
, 2012. Our evaluation data shows that vehicles running our IWA application show improvements in almost all of the performance metrics evaluated. Specifically, our data shows that improvements in travel time (139.89%), fuel consumption (11.77%), and environmental emissions - carbon dioxide [CO
₂
] (11.77%), etc. can be achieved through V2I communication.