A new technique for automatic incident detection in intelligent transportation systems using aggregation of traffic parameters

One of the recent research directions in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) focuses on Automatic Incident Detection (AID) techniques. Using advances in wireless networking and sensor technologies, modern vehicles have the ability to communicate with each other as well as with roadside infrastructure units in order to increase road safety. These innovations in transportation technology provide traffic managers with the ability to use data collected from the vehicles on the road to detect congestion and traffic incidents. Lately, many techniques were developed to alert drivers in advance about traffic incidents and to enable them to avoid congestion. In this paper, we propose two new techniques for automatic detection of traffic incidents in a highway scenario that are based on the use of distance and time for changing lanes, respectively vehicle speed changes over time. The proposed methods are illustrated with numerical results obtained from simulations that show higher incident detections rate those obtained with alternative methods.