A platform for the development and evaluation of passive safety applications

In this paper, we present a platform for aiding in the development and evaluation of novel ITS passive safety applications. Such applications work by having vehicles detect certain events that may be dangerous to other vehicles and disseminating reports about these events using wireless communication. A vehicle receiving the report about the event can then be warned. However, a large number of false warnings will lead to driver desensitization, which will reduce the safety benefit. To overcome this issue, a relevance estimator that will determine for which reports a warning will be given has to be devised for each new application. Our platform allows for an easy, fast method of developing these estimators and evaluating them in simulations. We demonstrated the feasibility of this approach with three example applications.