Police‐less multi‐party traffic violation detection and reporting system with privacy preservation

Abstract

This study presents a traffic violation detection and reporting system, that does not rely on costly infrastructure or the presence of law enforcement. It relies solely on broadcast messages among vehicles and reports delivery to the transportation authority. A vehicle is modelled as an automaton (in the computational sense) that has its own state and has a read access to the state of other automata of other vehicles in a constant size neighbourhood. The common traffic rules and communication rules make the program of these automata that guide the transitions of the vehicles in space and time. By observing the transitions of the vehicles in their neighbourhood, a vehicle can decide if these comply with the traffic rules encoded in the system. Whenever a transition is not performed according to the program, a violation occurs. These violations are reported and witnessed to the transportation authority by the vehicles in the neighbourhood, which act as witnesses and reporters. The system preserves privacy and allows no false positives.