Awareness Assessment of Connected Vehicles in Highway Driving: A Perceived Safety Approach

This article showcases a perceived safety analysis framework to assess the awareness of connected vehicles (CVs) of surrounding safety-critical vehicles. We study two classes of messages that a CV can transmit: 1) messages containing information about the transmitter only [e.g., standardized basic safety messages (BSMs) and cooperative awareness messages (CAMs)], and 2) messages that aggregate information about the transmitter and surrounding objects detected by their onboard sensors [e.g., collective perception messages (CPMs)]. We show how the proposed framework allows one to identify safety-critical vehicles and the effect of the type of transmitted messages on the awareness of these critical vehicles. To evaluate the performance, we use experimental data with mixed traffic of unconnected vehicles and CVs at different penetration ratios. Results show that CPMs are significantly more effective at providing awareness of safety-critical vehicles at low-to-mid-connectivity penetrations. At high-connectivity penetrations, messages with only information about the transmitter are sufficient to provide full awareness without burdening the wireless channel.