A Warning System Design for Camel-Vehicle Collisions Mitigation

In this paper, we propose a warning system to reduce camel-vehicle collision (CVC) in accident-prone roads of Sistan and Baluchestan province of Iran. The system consists of recording cameras, cellular network handsets, and a camel’s movement simulator unit. The position of camels, detected by infrared cameras installed on some passing vehicles through the road, is transmitted to a central processing unit via cellular network. The processing unit simulates the random process of camel movement, finds the probability of the camel presence in the neighbourhood over time, and broadcasts it to the passing vehicles periodically. To this end, we conduct a field measurement to collect traces of the camels’ movement. Then, we present a model of camel’s movement using hidden Markov model (HMM). To evaluate the warning system, we simulate the collisions occurrences in Iranshahr-Zehkalot road. Simulation results show that if all the passing vehicles are equipped with night vision cameras and the drivers use their mobile phones to receive warning messages and adapt their speed properly, the accidents are reduced by 92%.