A methodology for the development of novel VANET safety applications

We present a methodology for the development of passive ITS safety applications that aim to disseminate reports about dangerous events on the road. Examples of such applications include the emergency electronic brake light or the highway merge warning. A major issue with such applications is the decision of when a warning should be shown. Since the recipient vehicle may be far away from where the dangerous event occurred, a large number of false warnings may be shown to the drivers. This leads to driver desensitization which may reduce the safety benefits. While previous research has provided a way of handling false warnings by estimating the relevance of the reports, these methods do not take into all the important factors and are not easily adaptable for novel applications. In this paper, we propose a simulation platform for developing and evaluating relevance estimators for passive ITS safety applications that can be utilized for developing novel applications. The paper provides examples of the effectiveness of this platform on three previously proposed applications.