Decentralized spreading of ephemeral road incident information between vehicles

Abstract

Ephemeral incidents, or events in traffic or on the roadside that have only local and short-term impact on road safety and road capacity, are noteworthy for vehicles nearby—especially those approaching and planning to pass by. We study ways to communicate detected ephemeral incidents between connected vehicles, comparing various decentralized (vehicle-to-vehicle) communication strategies and weighing with established centralized mechanisms with regard to efficiency and broadcasting redundancy. The strategies are implemented in a simulation using realistic road networks, travel routes and traffic. We identify the strategy that achieves up to 100% success rate in transmitting incident messages to the affected vehicles under each scenario, while minimizing broadcast redundancy. In general, decentralized vehicle-to-vehicle communication strategies show strong potential to transmit incident messages efficiently and effectively.