A microsimulation approach for the impact assessment of a Vehicle-to-Infrastructure based Road Hazard Warning system

Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) rely on the use of communication technologies to enable vehicles to exchange information with other vehicles, roadside infrastructure, back-end centres and mobile devices. Verification or testing is required for C-ITS applications, in order to assess their impact on traffic operation. Microsimulation appears to be a robust tool that allows to gain insights into the implementation and performance of such systems. In this work, a microscopic traffic simulation approach is used, to evaluate the impact of Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) technologies in the context of a road traffic accident. Specifically, the methodology is implemented to study a Road Hazard Warning (RHW) system, using the open source microscopic traffic simulator SUMO. The approach explicitly models vehicles collisions, RHW, Emergency Electronic Brake Light (EEBL) warnings and the resulting driver behavior. Moreover, a new gap control mechanism is adopted, to improve safety by advising vehicles in hazard lane to increase their headways with respect to their preceding vehicle, so that they can avoid a collision. Perfect communication links to all vehicles are assumed. The study findings indicate that the proposed V2I hazard warning strategy has a positive impact on traffic flow safety and efficiency.