VEACON: A Vehicular Accident Ontology designed to improve safety on the roads

Vehicles are nowadays provided with a variety of new sensors capable of gathering information about themselves and from their surroundings. In a near future, these vehicles will also be capable of sharing all the harvested information, with the surrounding environment and among nearby vehicles over smart wireless links. They will also be able to connect with emergency services in case of accidents. Hence, distributed applications based on Vehicular Networks (VNs) will need to agree on a ‘common understanding’ of context for interoperability, and, therefore, it is necessary to create a standard structure which enables data interoperability among all the different entities involved in transportation systems. In this paper, we focus on traffic safety applications; specifically, we present the VEhicular ACcident ONtology (VEACON) designed to improve traffic safety. Our ontology combines the information collected when an accident occurs, and the data available in the General Estimates System (GES) accidents database. We assess the reliability of our proposal using both realistic crash tests, held in the facilities of Applus+ IDIADA in Tarragona, Spain, and Vehicular Network simulations, based on the ns-2 simulation tool. Experimental results highlight that both nearby vehicles and infrastructure elements (RSUs) are correctly notified about an accident in just a few seconds, increasing the emergency services notification effectiveness.