Cooperative Safety Intelligence in V2X-Enabled Transportation: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in V2X cooperative safety, emphasizing a unified SPD framework that integrates sensing, perception, and decision-making to enhance traffic safety through collective intelligence.

Contribution

It introduces a formal SPD safety loop framework and systematically analyzes research evolution and gaps in V2X safety literature from 2016 to 2025.

Findings

Organizes literature around a formal safety loop model.

Identifies research gaps and evaluation challenges.

Provides a roadmap for future cooperative safety systems.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) cooperation is reshaping traffic safety from an ego-centric sensing problem into one of collective intelligence. This survey structures recent progress within a unified Sensor-Perception-Decision (SPD) framework that formalizes how safety emerges from the interaction of distributed sensing, cooperative perception, and coordinated decision-making across vehicles and infrastructure. Rather than centering on link protocols or message formats, we focus on how shared evidence, predictive reasoning, and human-aligned interventions jointly enable proactive risk mitigation. Within this SPD lens, we synthesize advances in cooperative perception, multi-modal forecasting, and risk-aware planning, emphasizing how cross-layer coupling turns isolated detections into calibrated, actionable understanding. Timing, trust, and human factors are identified as cross-cutting constraints that determine whether predictive insights are delivered early enough, with reliable confidence, and in forms that humans and automated controllers can use. Compared with prior V2X safety surveys, this work (i) organizes the literature around a formal SPD safety loop and (ii) systematically analyzes research evolution and evaluation gaps through a PRISMA-guided bibliometric study of hundreds of publications from 2016-2025. The survey concludes with a roadmap toward cooperative safety intelligence, outlining SPD-based design principles and evaluation practices for next-generation V2X safety systems.