Integrating Self-Organizing Maps into Road Safety Benchmarking to Provide Improvement Paths: DEA-Based Kohonen Network Approach

Traffic crashes are still one of the leading causes of death worldwide, although tremendous efforts have been placed on reducing the frequency and severity through policy initiatives by governmental agencies and private organization services. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) based road safety benchmarking studies have been utilized as a robust tool to obtain a holistic picture of safety performance of regions, countries, etc. However, utilizing a road safety score with DEA often lacks guidance to provide an improvement path toward increasing road safety performance. Since there is significant variability among different regions in terms of variables such as population or vehicle miles traveled, not all regions can be grouped together to serve as benchmarks. In this study, a road safety assessment of the United States was first performed with a step-wise DEA approach where states were categorized into separate tiers based on their road safety performance. Then the states with similar input and output characteristics were clustered with a Kohonen Network (Self-Organizing Maps), which was used to provide improvement paths for inefficient states. According to the results, most states were found to be inefficient in terms of safety. In addition, safety belt usage, road condition and highway safety expenditures were observed as the most sensitive safety performance indicators (SPIs) to road safety performance.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB10 Transportation Safety Management. Alternate title: Integrating Self Organizing Maps into Road Safety Benchmarking to Provide Improvement Paths: A DEA-Based Kohonen Network Approach.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Egilmez, Gokhan
  • Park, Yong Shin
  • McAvoy, Deborah S
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Benchmarks; Highway safety; States
• Uncontrolled Terms: Data envelopment analysis; Performance indicators; Safety improvement; Safety performance; Self-organizing maps
• Geographic Terms: United States
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01553425
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-4757
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 16 2015 4:53PM