Traffic Accident Prevention in Low Visibility Conditions Using VANETs Cloud Environment

1. Introduction

In today's society, transportation has become an essential component of everyone's life. In some way or another, everyone is a road user. There has been a significant increase in the number of vehicles on the road, making road safety one of the major areas of concern. Although, the current transportation system has reduced distances by improving the road networks, but it has also increased the chances of death due to the expanding vehicle population (Kumar et al., 2021). Every year, traffic accidents claim the lives of lakhs of people and cause catastrophic injuries to millions more. Broken bones, concussions, haemorrhages, and even death can occur as a result of these accidents. Approximately 3000 people die every day due to road accidents globally wherein India alone accounts for 11% of these accidents (World Bank, 2021).

A country’s economic growth and healthcare system is directly affected by the road traffic accidents. The major causes for these accidents include factors such as human error, unsafe road environment, unfit vehicular conditions, or a combination of these (Prus et al., 2021). Human errors are identified as the major cause for these accidents, which may be mitigated by meliorating national law, policy design, and enforcement for all road users. Other methods like awareness campaigns in schools and colleges, developing a better licence issuing system and upgrading road-related infrastructure and post-crash services can all help reduce the number of deaths and injuries. But there are also some natural factors which are not in the hands of human.

Unsafe road environment come into existence due to bad road conditions and inadequate visibility caused due to environmental factors, slippery surface and insufficient safety facilities. During bad weather conditions, such as heavy rain, dense fog, and hail storms, visibility is reduced and the road surface becomes slick, which makes driving more dangerous (Vijayakumar et al., 2022). Every year, hundreds of people die on the road as a result of foggy conditions and what’s more worrisome is that it is becoming more lethal by the year. The number of accidents in these conditions increased by almost 20% in 2019 (Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, 2019). This number does not seem to decrease in coming years since the formation of dense fog is largely affected by the pollution in air.

Fine dust from construction activities, stubble burning, and motor vehicle emissions have a significant influence on visibility. In northern states of India, like Punjab and Haryana, this has posed a great challenge. The smoke produced by these factors reduces vision in the surrounding area. Furthermore, in cold weather, fog combines with the smoke to create a dense layer of smog that reduces visibility on the roadways to almost zero (Sharma & Masiwal, 2022). Fog densities are majorly classified into four categories as represented in Table 1.