Highway End-of-Queue Alerting System Based on Probe Vehicle Data.

Back-of-queue crashes are one of the main reasons for fatal accidents on US highways, which are commonly caused by driver inattention or distraction. It is important to improve driver’s situation awareness when approaching slow traffic or traffic queues when cruising on highways. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for developing a prototype end-of-queue alerting system that is based on the probe vehicle data. Speed changes among different road segments are used to identify slow traffic queues, which are compared with vehicle locations and moving directions to detect potential back-of-queue crashes. This system is designed to issue alerting messages to drivers approaching the queues via an Android-based smartphone App and an Android Auto device. Preliminary road test has proved the effectiveness of the prototype system. For the future work, the system functionality and reliability will be further improved, and multi-modal alerting parameters will be optimized via human subject tests.