An Improved Methodological Framework Based on Probe Vehicle Data for Detecting Secondary Crashes

Secondary crashes that occur on roadways frequently interrupt traffic operations. These non-recurrent incidents are often considered as a critical performance indicator in assessing traffic incident management programs. A number of methods have focused on the detection of these crashes either based on the static (with fixed spatiotemporal thresholds) or dynamic (e.g., queuing models and speed contour maps) approaches. However, the use of these approaches is often limited by their requirements for detailed incident records, special assumptions, unique model structures, etc. This paper aims to develop a new analysis framework to support the determination of secondary crashes. The proposed framework focuses on leveraging probe vehicle data to quantify secondary crashes. The key component of the framework is built upon the support vector clustering (SVC) method to detect the impact area of a primary crash and determine secondary crashes within it. Its performance is tested based on both simulation and an actual probe dataset. The results show that the SVC-based approach can correctly identifying more than eighty percent of the crashes, even under a low penetration rate (e.g., five percent) of probe vehicles. The increases in the penetration rate will further improve its performance. For practical implementation, there is no need to obtain probe data with very high penetration rate.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB20 Standing Committee on Safety Data, Analysis and Evaluation.
• Authors:
  • Yang, Hong
  • Wang, Zhenyu
  • Ozbay, Kaan
  • Xie, Kun
  • Zhu, Yuan
• 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; References;
• Pagination: 19p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Crash causes; Data collection; Incident management; Probe vehicles; Secondary crashes; Traffic control; Traffic incidents; Vector analysis
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01658997
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-03029
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 5 2018 11:26AM