Smart Roads: Literature Review
The concept of smart roads, also known as a smart highway, have been widely studied in the literature in the recent years. Smart road, which is sometimes defined as a part of the smart city (Holler et al., 2014), is the term which covers technologies incorporated to highways. The review of the literature of the issue shows that while smart highways can be highly useful for enhancing security and productivity of vehicles and are likely to be successful in the UAE in particular, safety and privacy are among their most fundamental problems which should be adequately addressed by their developers.
The definition of smart roads adopted in the literature relates to ways of improving the productivity of traditional roads. Its work is connected to communication between vehicles, also known as the concept of vehicle infrastructure integration. The smart highway is highly useful for preventing traffic collisions, thus improving the safety of smart roads as according to De La Peña (2015) “contribute to reducing road mortality and injury rates through more efficient design, construction, and maintenance of road infrastructures” (p.5). Moreover, it helps increase the productivity of cars due to the traffic management. Another example of smart roads involves automatic charging of cars on the go. In the recent years, smart roads have been widely implemented in several developed countries, including the United Kingdom, South Korea, and the United States (Tombs, 2016).
The question of security implications plays a major role in the research on smart highways. As the possibility of hacker attacks is extremely high, virtually all smart roads are designed to prevent them. For example, in the United States, a federal agency National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is responsible for developing a set of standards which ensure the ability to detect attacks and stop them in the real time (Herold, 2015). However, these efforts have not yet managed to prevent all kind of attacks. Greenberg (2015) describes the remote hacker attack on the smart car from his experience and argues that the number of real life examples of hacking smart roads. Thus, numerous examples of smart road security breaches show that the problem issue is far from being resolved.
Apart from security, another fundamental problem connected with smart roads is privacy. As smart roads gather huge amounts of information about their users in order to manage it and ensure greater productivity, or, as Elmaghraby and Losavio (2014) put it, “for modeling, visualizing, and understanding human behavior” (p. 5). Thus, potential data leaks constitute a significant problem which needs to be addressed by smart highways developers. The most efficient solution is to build full-scale security systems which would be able to provide smart roads users with effective security.
As the smart road is only an emerging technology and the United Arab Emirates have not adopted it yet, there is little research on the probability of introducing smart highway in the UAE. One of the potential problems of adopting this technology in the country is extremely high temperatures the …
