Cooperative vehicle-highway systems offer the potential to enhance the effectiveness of active vehicle safety systems, which have entered the marketplace for light vehicles and heavy commercial vehicles. Currently on the market are adaptive cruise control (ACC), forward collision warning, side collision warning, and lane departure warning systems -- all of which rely on vehicle-based sensors to perceive the surrounding environment and detect dangerous situations. These autonomous vehicle-based safety systems, while generally effective, have limitations based on the laws of physics -- they can't see around blind curves, for instance. At the same time, autonomous infrastructure systems can and have been deployed, which detect hazards in real-time and advise drivers via (typically) changeable message signs. Such infrastructure systems suffer from the limitation that they can only influence drivers who choose to pay attention to them; even then, a safe outcome depends completely on the driver making appropriate and timely decisions. Cooperative intelligent vehicle-highway systems (CIVHS) offer an improved level of overall functionality by bridging this gap. These systems are cooperative in that the vehicles can receive information from the roadway and respond appropriately, and vehicles can detect and report hazards to the roadway, for dissemination to other travelers. The systems are intelligent in that the ultimate response is determined by algorithms, which weigh multiple parameters, rather than a pre-programmed response. This paper describes the results of a study, the first of its kind as far as is known, to collect information on the various forms of cooperative IVHS worldwide, and assess research and development (R&D) activities, deployment issues, standards development, and government policies to gain a sense for the future of such systems. Activities to develop these results included information gathering and contacts with experts and policy-makers in government, the private sector, and academia. Sections of the full paper are CIVHS Application Areas, Significant Programs Worldwide, International Perspectives, User Issues, Deployment Issues, Relevant Standards Activity, and Observations. The full report is available at www.IVsource.net.
Samenvatting