The Effect of VII Market Penetration on Safety and Efficiency of Transportation Networks

Abstract

The introduction of the Vehicle Infrastructure Inte- gration (VII) initiative by the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) has recently attracted the attention of researchers and given rise to a plethora of studies, each one seeking to enhance the safety and efficiency of transportation networks in one way or another. Moreover, vehicles communicating with each other and with the infrastructure, render their drivers with more information on their surroundings, extending the horizon of drivers and making them more vigilant to face the unexpected. In this study, we provide a mathematical framework which foretells the effect of deploying VII-enabled vehicles, such as VII-assisted and VII-automated, on the overall safety and efficiency. We show that inter-vehicular communications improves the throughput of vehicles by reducing the Perception-Reaction times of drivers. Furthermore, we exhibit that this is obtained without needing to compromise over safety requirements. Our framework can be utilized by decision makers to anticipate the effect of VII on transportation networks prior to their real-life deployment. Index Terms—Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), Vehicle- Infrastructure Integration (VII), Dedicated Short Range Commu- nications (DSRC), Perception-Reaction (P-R) time.