Novel Method of Obtaining Critical Parameter in Safety Assessment for Maintenance Work Zone

Safety assessment of maintenance work zone is crucial for the safety of conservation personnel and traveling vehicles. To make up for the limitations of current methods to do timely safety assessment for maintenance work zones, this paper makes full use of the existing safety assessment theory, and proposes a method based on naturalistic driving study, automatic segmentation technology and spatial clustering analysis to obtain the critical parameter of a classic safety assessment model. Firstly, vehicle behavior data is collected by naturalistic driving method; secondly, using the automatic segmentation technology, the fragments containing traffic conflict information in the data are extracted; these fragments are then clustered by kernel density analysis to find the location of the high density point of traffic conflict; finally, the critical parameter is calculated, that is, the geometric relationship between the location and the maintenance work zone; then, input the critical parameter into the classic safety assessment method so as to achieve the purpose of safety assessment for maintenance work zone. Practice has proved that the key parameter obtaining method proposed in this paper fully takes into account the characteristics of maintenance work zones; it can collect the behavior data of vehicles passing through quickly and flexibly, then makes a timely safety assessment for the zone, thus can better meet the actual needs of maintenance.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB55 Standing Committee on Work Zone Traffic Control.
• Authors:
  • Xu, Zhepu
  • Yang, Qun
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Photos; References;
• Pagination: 14p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Automatic data collection systems; Behavior; Drivers; Highway maintenance; Highway safety; Risk assessment; Traffic conflicts; Traffic control; Work zone safety
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01658976
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-02713
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 5 2018 11:26AM