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Towards Real-Time Drink-Drive and Over-Speed Monitoring and Detection in South Africa
Towards Real-Time Drink-Drive and Over-Speed Monitoring and Detection in South Africa
Towards Real-Time Drink-Drive and Over-Speed Monitoring and Detection in South Africa
Abstract— This paper proposes an effective approach for drivers’ breath [17]. (See Fig. 1). In addition to drink-driving,
real-time monitoring and detection of drink-driving and over- over-speeding or exceeding the legal speed limit on the road is
speeding on South Africa (SA) roads using technologies of also a serious cause of injury and death on the road. Over-
vehicular networks (VANET) and Internet of Things (IoT). This speeding are carried out by reckless drivers who are usually
is because drink-driving and over-speeding have been known as influenced by excessive alcohol intake, drugs and other
the major causes of injuries and deaths on roads globally and SA dangerous substances. In spite of several interventions by the
is not an exception. As a viable solution, our proposed approach government, over-speeding still remains a great concern. At
is based on real-time measure to provide quick responses by the moment, over-speeding on SA roads is checked by the
traffic personnel aim at saving lives before the actual accident installation of motion cameras on side of major roads and by
occurs. To this end a theoretical framework of the system was
traffic officers taking snapshots of speeding drivers using
designed and an application prototype developed to monitor the
detected traffic offenders with respect to drink-driving and over-
video motion cameras which is carried out under high sun or
speeding. Moreover, we presented and discussed the system’s hash whether condition. (See Fig. 1). This paper thus,
operations and its functionalities. A novel application simulation considered these approaches not effective, not visible, risky
performed shows that the system is feasible and can accomplish and poses health concerns to such traffic officers. Hence, an
the task of road safety more effective than the existing effective and visible approach is needed to keep drink-driving
approaches. and over-speeding under check in a real-time. In other words,
accidents leading to injury and death can be reduced if there is
Keywords— Drink-driving, Over-speeding, VANETs, Vehicle, a system in place with an effective detection and monitoring
Road, Accident. mechanism to check drink-driving and over-speeding in real-
time.
I. INTRODUCTION
Drink-driving which frequently manifest to over-speeding
on the road has been considered as one of the leading causes
of traffic accidents globally [1][2][3][4]. This is because
driving under the influence of alcohol leads to decline of
perception, recognition, and even vehicle control which results
to unanticipated traffic crashes on the road [5]. In South Africa
(SA) for instance, drink-driving remains one of the major
causes of traffic accidents and poses a serious concern.
Despite several improvements to road safety measures such as
speed limits, seatbelts law, drink-driving check, sanctions, Fig. 1. Traffic officer checking drivers’ breath and snapping speedy vehicles
technologies and so on, road fatalities are still on the increase.
Therefore, there is the urgent need for strict improvements and Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) are network
interventions to ensure the situation is under control. The fact technology that have received significant attention in recent
remains the traffic accidents caused by excessive alcohol years [17]. It was introduced to maximize road or traffic
consumption and the lack of alertness in the drivers’ vehicles safety, enhance drivers’ alertness and transport efficiency by
pose a serious threat to the general public, not only the drivers providing real-time road traffic information as well as enhance
and their passengers. However, despite being a serious danger, the entertainment system of a vehicle in motion for the
the mode of detection these threats or simply drink-driving comfort of passengers [6][17]. VANET utilizes efficient
and over-speeding on SA roads have so far been based on technologies that support intelligent transportation systems
visual and irregular manual observation by traffic officers (ITS) [7] having communication models and architectures
[17]. which are either vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-
infrastructure (V2I) communication [6][7][17].
Presently, the intervention to detect drink-driving is weak,
randomly and manually performed by traffic officers using the Moreover, communication are provided either via road side
Breath Analyzer System (BAS) to detect alcohol presence in units (RSUs) or on board units (OBUs) [8][17] (See Fig. 2).
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The above discussed related studies focused on different used to store and retrieve important traffic information either
approaches to prevent or reduce drink-driving and over- in real-time or later by the traffic officers.
speeding related accidents on the road. While [15] requires the
automatic control of the care if high alcohol is detected on the
body, [5][11] and [14] proposed a system that activated an
alarm and alert nearby police. Accordingly, [16] only warned
other drivers on the same road to be cautious to avoid accident
and [4] alerted the driver and any chosen contact using SMS.
However, the approach in this paper is based on both
monitoring of alcohol concentration and over-speeding in real-
time on the road to avoid accident occurring by automatically
alerting traffic personnel for timely intervention. In addition, it
will store data on regular basis for analysis and future decision
making using a cloud-based server.
III. THE PROPOSED SYSTEM
In this section, we present the proposed system in terms of
its architecture, components and operations [17].
A. System Overview
This system is derived from the idea of VANET and IoT. The
aim is to mitigate road accidents caused by drink-driving and
over-speeding on SA roads. Furthermore, it is also aimed at Fig. 3. System architectue [17]
ensuring that traffic officers’ lives are not exposed to health
hazards as currently experienced. The system is expected to 2) Traffic office/checkpoint (TOC): TOC acts as the end-
operate in real-time manner to detect both drink-driving and points or receiving point of the data collected by the sensors.
over-speeding. In particular, the IoT is employed via sensors in TOC consist of the traffic officers and the Client Application
vehicles which senses driver’s breath and over-speed inside the which is both stand-alone and web-based installed in the PC
vehicle and communicate the information using VANET and linked to the system. The application shows data tables which
IoT technologies to traffic officers in real-time [17]. To realize contain details and status of traffic offenders in terms of over-
this, an application was developed that allows traffic officers speeding and drink-driving as well as traffic map used to
on duty to view drink-driving and over-speeding offenders in monitor the designated roads in real time.
real-time as displayed on the traffic map (See Fig. 8 and 9). 3) Vehicle system: The vehicle system or the OBU
With this real-time data, traffic officers can go after the
comprised of all the hardware components integrated into the
corresponding drivers as quick measures to prevent disasters on
the road. Furthermore, the system also employs a system vehicle which will assist in the collection of data: speed limit
administrator who will be responsible for managing the entire and high alcohol concentration in drivers’ breath, location
system. Requirements for this proposed system were elicited coordinate (via global positioning system (GPS) or a
using the observation technique where we observed series of differential global positioning system (DGPS) receiver) and
accidents on the roads that has resulted to serious injuries and transmit them via 3G/4G/5G network in real-time to the
deaths as well as the practical operations of the traffic receiving end for onward processing, feedback and other
personnel. necessary actions [17]. It also include a display unit where
feedback sent to drivers as warning can be viewed as well as a
B. System Architecture controller for data processing.
The system architecture communicate visually and
theoretically, the framework as well as the interrelationship C. Network Architecture
between the components of the system. This is captured in In order to guarantee effective functioning of the proposed
Fig. 3. The components are the cloud-based database, vehicle system, VANET is employed given the involvement of
system, and the Traffic office & Checkpoint (TOC). moving vehicles as well as the Internet. In this case, both OBU
and RSU are used to facilitate information sharing between the
The basic components of the system architecture are discussed TOC and each vehicle in real-time basis. The OBU is the
as follows: mobile node acting as a transceiver device installed in each
vehicle with other hardware devices to wirelessly receive and
1) Cloud-based database: This is a web entity or a cloud process the information then send it as messages to the RSU.
server where data collected by sensors are stored using RSU is the static node which will be fixed along the road side.
VANET connection via the Internet in real-time. It allow data It will wirelessly connect the OBU to the Internet or to another
to be shared and accessed at anytime, anywhere and stored TOC’s server to get real-time information about traffic
data for future usage. To this end the cloud database will be activities on the road. (See Fig. 4). The chosen communication
architecture model is the V2I and the different vehicle speed
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limits in each road [17]. However, the connectivity between vehicle to help achieve the goal of detection and transmission.
RSU and OBU in each vehicle could impacts data routing and This is captured in Fig. 5, which includes the breathe analyzer
their throughput. sensors, meter reader, display unit, controller and network
access (i.e. OBU) [17]. The architecture of the vehicular
system is referred to as a mobile node.
1) Breath analyser sensors: This electronic sensor system
is installed on the driver’s side atop the steering. It is an auto-
breath analyser which is designed to detect alcohol presence in
the driver’s breath and forward the sensed data to the
controller.
2) Meter reader: This device connects the vehicle’s
speedometer to the controller which monitor the speed and
read values at regular interval.
3) The controller: It is a central processing system that
received sensed data as input from the sensors and the meter
reader which is also integrated with an access point otherwise
called the OBU. To ensure data is send/receive in real-time,
the system on each vehicle is always active and functioning
until a vehicle is switched off.
4) Display unit: This is a mini screen or display
incorporated to each vehicle which is used to automatically
display TOC’s messages in the form of warnings whenever
high alcohol concentration and speed is detected.
5) Access point: This is the OBU, a network device that
communicates to and from the RSU in real-time.
Fig. 4. Proposed system architecture [17]
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A. Controller Operation The proposed system will function effectively and with better
The system will operate by continuously sensing and performance by maintaining a centralized but distributed
computing the data received from the sensor and the speed traffic database in SA having both driver and vehicle
reader. However, not all the data sensed will be recorded and information. The information to be collected about a driver
transmitted. In this case, data is only recorded if the driver is will include the ID_no, fname, sname, gender, age, phone_no,
over-speeding or has exceeded the allowed/legal alcohol e-mail and recent address. For the vehicle, car_type, model,
concentration for a driver on SA roads. The process of reg_no, engine_no and color will be collected. This database is
checking and validating whether data should be recorded is expected to be in active connection, fast, reliable, robust and
shown in the algorithm represented by the flowchart in Fig. 6. be able to handle multitude of queries and request in seconds.
A. System Interfaces
This section presents the core traffic monitoring interfaces
offered by the system. The interfaces provided are user-
friendly and simple. To use the application, traffic officers
have to first authenticate themselves to gain access by way of
login. After login, the traffic officer will be redirected to the
traffic main page which shows a table containing information
of offenders’ vehicles in real-time with color highlights
showing the severity of the offence. For instance, high alcohol
Fig. 7. System interaction process [17]
level or percentage and speed limit will be highlighted in red
colour. (See Fig. 8) The importance is to enable traffic officers
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take necessary actions against the offending drivers in time. saving them from being in contact with contiguous or airborn
Furthermore, there is also a regular real-time updates of the disease such flu, tuberculosis and so on.
information about the alcohol concentration and the speed
4) Decision aid: With the data or statistics generated by
about a particular vehicle. On the other hand, the traffic map
the system, such data can be used to support decisions that can
as shown in Fig. 9 will provide traffic officers with a visual
be used to improve the transpotation system in the economy
information about the traffic on the road, given location of
and other realted areas.
each vehicle and severity of the offence. In Fig. 9, the vehicle
icon in the map is colored red if the car is an offender. Such
icon can further be clicked to view the information about the VI. CONCLUSION
vehicle and track it accordingly. In this paper, we have presented an approach to monitor and
In the perspective of the system administrator, after login, he detect drink-driving and over-speed on South Africans’ roads
or she will be directed to an administrative page which is automatically without or with minimum intervention of traffic
equipped with more privileges and functionalities to perform personnel. The system employed the technologies of IoT and
the tasks of manage information, creating, reading, updating VANET supported by cloud storage to bring innovations to
and deleting drivers and users in the system. However, in this transportation sector of the economy. The paper presented a
paper, we focused only on the monitoring and detection theoretical-design framework and provided explanation of the
aspects. different components as well as their operations. Moreover,
the benefits of the system were outlined in terms of efficiency
and response time, passenger safety, automation and so on.
Also, the system can serve as data generator for traffic
statistics which can be used for research to enhance traffic
monitoring strategies in the future. Consequently, we conclude
that, if this idea discussed in this paper is adopted for
implementation, it could go a long way to save thousands of
lives on the road. Accordingly, real-time drink-driving and
over-speeding monitoring and detection system is necessary
for road safety on SA roads.
Despite the benefits, the proposed system is without
limitations. This paper only provided a theoretical-design
framework but a complete implementation is yet to be realized
due to financial constraints and resources. However, the
assessment performed on the prototype are promising. As part
of the future work, we intend to procure the needed resources
to implement the complete system for trial on real-world
vehicle on the road to determine its actual effectiveness.
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