Development and Evaluation of High-Speed Differential Warning Application Using Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

Connected vehicle (CV) technology has shown great potential in enhancing safety, mobility, and environmental sustainability of roadway transportation systems by enabling vehicles and infrastructure to exchange real-time information through wireless communications. The information available through CV technology has been used to develop a variety of onboard driver assistance tools and applications. This paper presents an innovative, safety-focused CV application called the high-speed differential warning (HSDW). The application identifies potential hazards resulting from high-speed differentials between HSDW-equipped vehicles (ego-vehicles) and surrounding remote vehicles and then provides alerts to drivers of ego-vehicles to help them take appropriate actions. In this research, real-world scenarios and parameters of the HSDW application are first identified. A driver response strategy for each scenario is then developed in consonance with findings from a public survey on the HSDW application. Next, a comprehensive evaluation of various scenarios is conducted with a well-calibrated Paramics traffic microscopic simulation tool set up for a real-world traffic network. Finally, the safety performance of HSDW-equipped vehicles, unequipped vehicles, and overall traffic is analyzed with the surrogate safety assessment model. Results demonstrate that the proposed HSDW application improves the safety performance of ego-vehicles without compromising the mobility and environmental sustainability performance of the overall traffic.