Vehicular Networking Road Weather Information System Tailored for Arctic Winter Conditions

Abstract

Winter conditions are dominating the road traffic platform in the Northern Scandinavia, as the platform availability must be ensured regardless of the amount of snow, surface slipperiness or such kind of events. Weather services play an important role in successful road traffic operations, especially in the Northern areas, where the weather conditions vary substantially. Intelligent Road project is contributing towards tackling this challenge and aims to support the development of business community in Northern Scandinavian region by road safety provision via vehicular networking based services in Nordic weather conditions. The specific objective of the project was the demonstration of sustainable and marketable Intelligent Road System providing location-based short-term road weather information to the road user passing by the area. In this paper we present the service concept, service demonstration and communication field tests of such a system in Northern Finland. FMI’s combined Road Weather Station (RWS)/Road Side Unit (RSU) is acting as a central infrastructural element of such vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication platform, supported with areal infrastructure and third party vehicles equipped with weather measurement and communication infrastructure.  The aim is to employ road weather systems of FMI and furthermore exploit RWS data as well as the data gathered from vehicle instrumentation. The resulting up-to-date and localized weather data is then delivered to the stakeholders, tourists and even the vehicles in the operating area in real-time, using variety of vehicular networking methodologies available. IEEE 802.11p based vehicular networking is the primary communication channel, supported with traditional Wi-Fi and 3G communications.