Quantifying the benefit of accident notification application in freeway VANETs

While there are a number of incident notification applications (i.e., traveler alert systems, accident post notification, etc.), benefits of this type of applications has not been analyzed and quantified in the traffic engineering perspective. In this paper, we implemented the state-of-the-art incident notification application to quantify its benefit in a scenario where an accident takes place on an urban freeway. The simulation results suggest that driver commute time and carbon dioxide emission can be significantly reduced. Nevertheless, such the improvement varies depending on many factors such as vehicle density, fraction of informed and re-routed vehicles, and availability of alternative routes, etc.