Using Smartphones to Enable Situation Awareness on Highways

Motivated by the proliferation of Smartphone devices, the authors present a system architecture to enable the delivery and exchange of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) messages to Smartphones on the road. The purpose is to provide an ITS situation awareness system architecture that would enable application developers to build Smartphone applications for ITS mobility and safety. The authors present a “Slow Traffic Ahead” application as a means to validate the architecture and perform a field experiment in the San Francisco Bay Area comprised of 30 users to test the performance of the system. The authors conclude the paper with the data analysis and recommendations for improving the configurable parameters of the system architecture to provide better user experience and more accurate timing of alerts.