Abstract
Keywords- telematics, wireless, cooperative, infomobility, architecture
Until the end of ´80 speaking about of infomobility and connected cars would have seemed quite strange. The population of cars on the road networks did not need sophisticated systems and infrastructures to monitor and control the traffic flows. Over the years this population was growing (76% of Europeans use the car for their movement) and roads were more and more suffering of accidents (50 thousand/year fatalities in Europe). Nowadays urban roads and highways are showing critical issues in terms of queues, accidents, road works, ... and considering that the road network capacity is not infinite, other paradigm of mobility should be applied for reducing journey setbacks and social costs (200 BEUR/year in Europe).
Considering that status, in order to increase the mobility efficiency and safety, many infomobility systems have been more and more adopted in the last decades. They are based on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), mainly based on both roadside infrastructures and traffic management centres. Traditionally the passenger car has not been considered as part of the ITS architecture, leaving its detection to other different sensors, such as inductive loops, video cameras, ..., and demanding the mobility information mainly to roadside message signs. In the future scenario the passenger cars, which will be increasingly equipped with telematics platform, should be included within the ITS architecture for at least the following main reasons:
1) to estimate the traffic condition over the road network in favour of a lighter and low cost roadside infrastructure;
2) to provide customised information to the drivers on the base of theirs locations and destinations.
This paper will highlight how the connected cars could support the next generation infomobility systems. Technologies such as localisation and navigation to collect and map traffic flows and data, Human Machine Interface (HMI) to dispatch information to the drivers, communication to enable the connectivity as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) or vehicle-toinfrastructure (V2I), could represent the potential enablers toward the infomobility systems and connected cars.