Extended environmental information (extended FCD)

Description
The idea of Floating Car Data (FCD) is to monitor individual vehicles to gather data concerning the traffic situation on the whole road network. The in-vehicle equipment records the location of the car, speed and possibly other information such as acceleration or deceleration, and sends the recorded information to the central system or to other cars. The central collected data can be used as content for different applications and services. Floating car data can also be implemented as a decentralised system as in the German FleetNet project.

Impacts
No reliable safety estimates yet exist. The safety and other benefits from extended environmental information will follow from the user services utilising the information collected. Hence, the system should affect especially accidents in adverse conditions.

Studies

Floating Vehicle Data (FVD) can be used to monitor real time and historic traffic levels on both urban and inter urban networks. FVD can provide reliable and effective coverage over widespread networks and areas in an economically viable manner that is not always possible when fixed network monitoring applications are used.

The paper is based on practical experiences in Britain.

Simmons N.

2005

Using floating vehicle data as network management tool. Proceedings, 12h World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, 6-10 November, San Francisco, USA