Effect of Vehicle to Vehicle and Vehicle to Infrastructure Communication Systems on Transportation Safety

The world of telecommunications is providing us with a lot of communication paradigms that can be utilized as a means of wireless communication between mobile and stationary agents or between mobile agents themselves. As transportation engineers, we are interested in knowing the schemes that can be applied to the field of transportation engineering to alleviate traffic problems like safety, congestion, environmental degradation and off late, energy consumption by the vehicles, to name a few. Intelligent Transportation Systems are undergoing a transition from demonstration projects to becoming part of the mainstream set of options available to transportation planners. Hence, evaluation of ITS is one of the most critical and important steps to be taken before any ITS technique can be deployed. Safety has been recently emerging as an area of increased concerns, attention and awareness within transportation engineering. It has been extremely difficult to evaluate safety for new and innovative traffic treatments. In this paper, we first review all the available techniques for communication between various vehicles among themselves and with the infrastructure. The aim of this is to have a complete overview of all the possible communication techniques that the world of electronics and telecommunications have proposed in the last years that can be applied for accomplishing the task of enabling vehicles communicate and interact with other vehicles as well as with the infrastructure. Then we propose a method to evaluate safety based on safety parameter called Risk Index (R.I.) to evaluate the use of vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communication technologies for safety.