Overview
Incident detection is an essential capability for road authorities to manage their road networks and adequately respond to incidents. Issues with the quality of detection, such as a high false alarm rate, delays in detection, or inaccurate location of incidents, directly impact operations. High quality of data enables faster resolution of incidents and pro-active measures to avoid traffic disturbance.
RAIDER is a research project aiming to improve incident detection systems by incorporating new technologies for road side systems and utilising in-vehicle systems and nomadic devices. Improvements in incident detection are expressed in terms of detection quality and the estimated costs and benefits of the detection systems. RAIDER has a focus on near future technology improvements.
Road authorities are consulted to identify the three most relevant classes of incidents, and to assess their current system performance, operational issues and future requirements. Potential performance of new technologies is evaluated, and generic specifications are defined to incorporate these new technologies in system concepts to improve existing incident detection systems.
Funding
Results
The main conclusions and recommendations that can be motivated are:
- As eCall will be mandatory, it is expected to provide reliable and accurate detections of almost all major accidents on all roads after 2020 at a low cost for the NRA. It can be recommended to integrate eCall in incident detection systems of NRAs. Nevertheless, it cannot provide detections of other incidents and other systems will be needed, even for detection of minor accidents.
- Cooperative systems will provide reliable and accurate warnings for accidents, vehicle breakdowns and congestion that can directly be applied for incident detection by the NRA on all road types. Once the penetration rate is sufficiently high, it will provide the best detection performance and the most cost-effective system concept. However, the penetration rate is expected to be too low to meet the required detection rates by 2020.
- Nomadic devices provide a cost-effective solution for all three types of incidents. The detection performance may not satisfy the minimal requirements in all Use Cases. The reliability of accident and breakdown detection is significantly less than for eCall or in-vehicle systems. The detection delay may be too large due to the communication and service provision solutions. The competition in the number of applications and service providers may also result in low penetration rates of vehicles providing the detection information.
- Bluetooth detectors provide the most cost effective solution to congestion detection if the detection delay and accuracy due to the detector spacing are acceptable.
- Video tracking and scanning radar systems are the only detection technologies considered in this project that can provide the required performance for accident and breakdown detection by 2020. These road side solutions should be considered as an intermediate solution till they can be replaced by in-vehicle or nomadic devices.