A major evolution resulting from road telematics incontestably is the use of in-vehicle devices in order to improve user's comfort and/or the road safety. Thus, alarm systems warn the driver about effective or potential dangers related to an abnormal behavior of its vehicle and incidents downstream on its route. Alarm in road safety covers the means or devices suitable to forward a signal to a user. Alarm has to get the attention of the drivers approaching a vehicle involved in an incident. The study presented in this paper deals with an alarm system by electronic messages (SAM). SAM is a vehicle-to-vehicle communication system and is based upon the analysis of the alarm situations and upon the possible means to generate and transmit the alarm. Prior to introducing on the market such a system, it is necessary to assess its possible impact on the road safety. Simulation is the best way to evaluate the impacts on traffic phenomena, in particular from a security point of view. The INRETS has done research on road traffic simulation based upon the actual driver behavior for more than ten years and has developed a behavioral simulation model: ARCHISIM. This model has been chosen to study the impact of SAM on the road traffic. In this paper, we first present the SAM system and the behavioral simulation model ARCHISIM. Then the results from the first simulations done with ARCHISIM and the simulated SAM system are presented and the assumptions made for these simulations are discussed.
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