An agent-based paradigm for detecting and acting on vehicles driving in the opposite direction on highways

• The presented paradigm supposes an important improvement in road safety.
• The paradigm has been implemented and simulated, obtaining a success ratio of 100%.
• The use of an agent-based architecture enables the scalability of the platform.

Thanks to recent technological advances, traffic accidents have been significantly reduced. However, they still occur in high numbers and caused by different factors. One of these accidents results extremely serious and involves a large number of fatalities: the collision between two vehicles when one of them drives the wrong way on a highway. This paper proposes a new paradigm based on the exchange of information between the vehicles and the infrastructure nodes placed on the highway in order to detect vehicles driving in the wrong direction. The paradigm has been implemented in an agent-based architecture that permitted to create a simulator for assessing the proposed system. A total of seventy tests were performed by seven users, who participated by introducing different trajectories and number of vehicles, achieving a success ratio of 100%.