Decentralized management of ephemeral traffic incidents

Ephemeral traffic incidents, such as a fallen tree on a road, pose traffic safety hazards, and impact locally on traffic. While these incidents are neither predictable nor persistent, their existence is relevant for all vehicles planning to pass by while the impact continues. This article develops a novel communication strategy for vehicular ad hoc networks aiming to inform all the affected vehicles, while involving only the minimum number of non-affected vehicles. This strategy exploits time geography as a spatial and temporal filter, ensuring also that the information broadcasting timely terminates when the incident is over. Agent-based traffic simulations show that, when a road is temporarily blocked due to an ephemeral incident, the proposed decentralized information management model achieves significant improvement in travel efficiency and automatically updates outdated incident information in time.