IntelliDrive℠

Objective

To develop an understanding of the feasibility of utilizing IntelliDrive℠ weather–related data elements in weather application development.

Description

The use of vehicles to collect weather data offers an opportunity to revolutionize the weather enterprise by significantly increasing the density of weather observations near the surface and providing unique datasets for deriving and inferring road condition information.

Nonetheless, the use of data from vehicles poses significant technical challenges, particularly with respect to data quality and quantity. The amount of data potentially flowing through a vehicle-based data network, such as IntelliDrive(SM), could be immense and it is likely that many prospective users will not be capable of handling the vast quantities of data that are expected. Applications (middleware) must be implemented to facilitate the use of vehicle-based weather data because the feasibility of utilizing vehicle probe data will be lower and there will be substantially more risk in its use without such a function.

The Research Applications Laboratory, with support from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the U.S. Department of Transportation ITS Joint Program Office, is investigating ways of deriving weather and road condition information from vehicle data elements. To this end, efforts are underway to:
  • Explore the use vehicles as weather and road condition sensors;
  • Investigate methods of combining vehicle data elements and other data
  • Conduct analysis regarding quantity, quality and timeliness of data elements
  • Develop a Vehicle Data Translator to ingest, process, and generate derived weather and road condition products for road segments; and
  • Examine in-vehicle information systems for communicating weather and road hazards