Co-operative traffic safety system developed in Finland

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Mobisoft Oy and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, with support from partners, have developed a communication system for drivers to inform them about weather and road conditions and prevent serious or fatal accidents. When there is snow or ice on the road, the risk of an accident is increased by a factor of 4.1 compared to normal conditions, according to research conducted at the Tampere University of Technology.
March 22, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
814 VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Mobisoft Oy and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, with support from partners, have developed a communication system for drivers to inform them about weather and road conditions and prevent serious or fatal accidents.

When there is snow or ice on the road, the risk of an accident is increased by a factor of 4.1 compared to normal conditions, according to research conducted at the Tampere University of Technology.

VTT and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, under the international WiSafeCar project and with support from partners, have developed a vehicle and traffic communication system aimed at improving traffic safety. This communication system was developed with Finland’s challenging climate conditions in mind.

The system allows vehicles to transmit traffic and weather observations to a traffic service centre, where the data are analysed and conveyed to other vehicles on the road, together with information on road conditions. The system also alerts drivers in case of imminent danger of an accident due to slippery road.

The project involved testing short-range data transfer compliant with the IEEE 802.11p standard, and long-range communication based on a mobile phone network. VTT says it believes this is the first pilot project in Finland to employ both mobile radio technologies at the same time.

The WiSafeCar project involves nine research organisations and companies in Finland, Luxembourg and South Korea; the project was started in 2009 and ends in March 2012. Commercialisation of the project results has been launched with traffic services development, and more results will be forthcoming over the next two years. The project consortium will continue to disseminate the results under a new project, CoMoSeF.
Networking & Communication Systems Air Quality & Weather Systems Location Based Systems

For more information on companies in this article

VTT

Related Content

  • US DOTs introduce measures to stop wrong-way driving
    March 28, 2018
    Wrong-way driving (WWD) is a remarkably innocuous term for incidents that all too often cause some of the worst accidents that emergency services have to deal with. Several US states are now taking steps to minimise the problem, as Alan Dron finds out. You’re driving down a highway at night when you see approaching headlights. You initially assume they are merely those of an oncoming car on the opposite carriageway. It’s only when they are within 200 yards or so that you realise that the other driver is in
    Read More
  • New solutions to old problems set to cut emergency response times
    April 30, 2015
    David Crawford looks at the latest developments in emergency response. Ensuring speedier reactions to transport and travel crises is becoming increasingly important. US statistics suggest that as many as 1,000 ‘saveable’ lives can be lost each year in major cities because of operational defects in their SOS operations.
    Read More
  • Airborne traffic monitoring - the future?
    March 1, 2013
    A new frontier in the quest to monitor road traffic is opening up… but using airborne drones to reduce the jams comes with some thorny issues. Chris Tindall reports. Imagine if you could rely on a system that provided all the data you needed to regulate traffic flow, route vehicles and respond swiftly to emergencies for a fraction of the cost of piloting a helicopter. That system exists, but as engineers and traffic managers start to explore the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – more commonly k
    Read More
  • Pollution has more than one solution
    April 7, 2014
    Professor Alexander Baklanov of the World Meteorological Organization talks to Colin Sowman about the difficulties of reducing urban pollution. The inhabitants of Beijing have recently been suffering pollution levels 20 times the World Health Organisation’s recommended limit while the European Union is revitalising its efforts to implement and enforce air quality standards. Almost inevitably much of the clean-up efforts are likely to focus on traffic planners and engineers.
    Read More

Highlighted Content