Improvements on the enforcement process based on intelligent transportation techniquesmodel and mechanisms for electronic reporting, offence notification and evidence generation

Resumen

Enforcement activities in the road traffi c context have shown to be one of the key factors for reducing fatalities. However, despite their evolution (both in their underlying legislation and their technical means), there are several aspects that may be subject to improvement. Three of them are on the focus of this thesis. First, victims of offenders are usually not able to report them, as there are not enough data to support their claims. Second, there is a significant delay between the offence and its notification, which negatively affects to its educational purpose. Third, the offender does not have the practical chance to defend herself (i.e. claim her innocence or, at least, that it was a less serious offence) as there are no suitable attesting elements. In order to contribute on these issues, recent advances on data processing, communication and sensing capabilities of vehicles conform an interesting technological context. These new capabilities are the basis over which a new family of services, called Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are being developed. Despite the new opportunities provided by ITSs, it does not exist an adequate framework to guide the introduction of these new techniques in the surveillance of the adherence to the road traffi c rules. Thus, there is a lack of a clear view on how these techniques may help on the aforementioned problems. The general goal of this thesis is to provide the technical basis for the realization of an ITS-enhanced electronic road traffi c administrative enforcement process. Particularly, four contributions are developed in this thesis. First, an enforcement process model is proposed, based on the results of the European VERA2 project. The model describes the entities, the stakeholders, the data at stake and the underlying security considerations. It conforms the aforementioned framework that enables identifying where to introduce the required ITS enhancements. Based on the previous model, the remaining contributions focus on the development of specific mechanisms where the enforcement actors (the offender, the offence witnesses, the victims and the Authority) participate actively through ITS-related technologies. Thus, the second contribution is a mechanism that enables victims to report their offenders. In order to prevent this action to be noticeable by the reported driver, the report information is embedded into innocuous-looking messages by means of steganography. As the educational purpose of the punishment grows with its immediacy, the third contribution is a protocol to send an offence notification to the offending vehicle. Thanks to the human-machine interface of the vehicle, the offender is able to realize about the fine even during the same trip in which the offence was committed. Finally, in order to ensure that the driver has adequate means to defend herself against unfair punishments, a protocol to create evidences on its recent driving behavior has been proposed. Such evidences are based on the sensorial perceptions by surrounding vehicles, which are contacted using ITS communication technologies. At the light of these contributions, this thesis opens the door to upcoming developments that may end into a fully automated enforcement process. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------