Intelligent Transport Systems – Road weather information and forecast system for vehicles

Abstract

The modern vehicular communication methodologies allow the creation of the very perspective road weather services, delivered directly to vehicles, and enhanced with near real-time vehicular observations. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) initiative along with related standardization presents the technological approaches for a vehicular communication and an autonomous driving. Vehicular local area networking (VANET) utilizing Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication tools with the IEEE 802.11p protocol and the European ITS-G5 amendment, along with a 4G/5G cellular networking and hybrid models of them are the key technological approaches for this communication entity. Road weather services are based on a weather information generated either for the large geographical areas or at the specific spots like city centers. However, regular and exact weather forecasts and services, tailored for the specific road stretches, would be more beneficial for the road users, thus also increasing a traffic fluency and a safety. To provide such services, one would need to have access to the latest observations originating from the mobile vehicles and the local road weather stations as well as the weather forecasts from experts. One of the objectives for the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) is developing a system to collect, deliver and display a road weather data. In this paper, we present our approach for this ideology. FMI is developing a service to help driving in the different weather conditions, allowing increase the traffic safety by delivering near real-time road weather and hazard information directly to the vehicular application.