WSN-based early alert system for preventing wildlife-vehicle collisions in Alps regions

In this paper a preliminary study of applying a WSN-based system for the prevention of road incident because of wildlife road crossing is presented. The proposed system is composed by a network of sensors and actuators in order to detect wildlife approaching the road and to warn the driver in real-time by means of light signal devices. The nodes of the network are installed on the road sides and wirelessly interconnected in order to share the sensed data. A remote control unit deals with the storage and the processing of the collected information. Starting from the detection events, the proposed system identifies the areas with higher probability of wildlife crossing by means of customized classification approaches. The capabilities of the proposed system have been preliminarily assessed by means of an experimental setup installed in a controlled environment located in Alps regions strongly affected by the problem of wildlife-vehicle collisions.