Unlocking the Potential of C-ITS Data for the Deployment of Traffic Management Systems

The growing dependence on private vehicular transportation and the escalating impacts of climate change exacerbate issues on road safety, such as increased accident rates and the degradation of road infrastructure. To address this, the faster deployment of new intelligent services and the digitization of road environments is being encouraged by public authorities, as Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) message dissemination to road users and traffic analysis can help mitigate the constraints inherent in the prevailing transportation paradigm. This paper presents a cloud-based framework integrated within a publicly available Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) system, for traffic monitoring and analysis. The proposed system leverages existing V2X communications, namely Collective Perception Messages (CPMs) generated by radar-equipped Road-Side Units (RSUs), to estimate traffic flows in a Smart City environment. The obtained results prove the feasibility of the devised solution, with error rates smaller than 10%, for assessing the number of vehicles crossing certain reference points on both urban and highway scenarios.

I. Introduction

The most recent statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO) underline the seriousness of road traffic accidents, which cause approximately 1.19 million deaths and up to 50 million serious injuries each year [1]. Recognizing the urgency of addressing this issue, the “Global Plan for the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021-2030” has been formulated [2], outlining strategies to reduce road deaths and serious injuries by at least 50% by the end of the current decade. Similarly, at the European level, the strategic goal of “Vision Zero” has been adopted [3], which aims to achieve zero fatalities on European roads by 2050. Additionally, it is imperative to recognize the significant environmental footprint of the transport sector, which, e.g., in Europe, contributes to a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. In this context, the European Comission (EC) has proposed a revision of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) directive to encourage the faster deployment of new intelligent services and to stimulate the digitization of crucial road environments [4].