Real-Time Associative Memory–Based Rear-End Collision Warning System

Abstract

In the intelligent transportation system field, there has been a growing interest in developing collision warning systems based on artificial neural network (ANN) techniques in an effort to address several issues associated with parametric approaches. Previous ANN-based collision warning algorithms were generally based on predetermined associative memories derived before driving. Because collision risk is highly related to the current traffic situation, such as traffic state transition from free flow to congestion, however, updating associative memory in real time should be considered. To improve further the performance of the warning system, a systemic architecture is proposed to implement the multilayer perceptron neural network–based rear-end collision warning system (MCWS), which updates the associative memory with the vehicle distance sensor and smartphone data in a cloud computing environment. For the practical use of the proposed MCWS, its collision warning accuracy is evaluated with respect to various time intervals for updating the associative memories and market penetration rates. Results show that the MCWS exhibits a steady improvement in its warning performance as the time interval decreases, whereas the MCWS works more efficiently as the sampling ratio increases overall. When the sampling ratio reaches 50%, the MCWS shows a particularly stable warning accuracy, regardless of the time interval. These findings suggest that the MCWS has great potential to provide an acceptable level of warning accuracy for practical use, as it can obtain the well-trained associative memories reflecting current traffic situations by using information from widespread smartphones.