Safety performance functions in a road environment with automated vehicles
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55329/fzyz2882Keywords:
automated vehicles (AVs), crashes, market penetration, safety performance functions (SPFs)Abstract
The reduction of road fatalities can be achieved by intervening in various aspects, including infrastructure, transportation policy, vehicles, and driver behavior. One of the most promising solutions to solve this issue is to rely on Automated Vehicles (AVs), which can prevent human errors, which account for most crashes. However, the impact of AVs on road safety is still unquantifiable. The reason resides in a lack of observed data, as well as in the uncertainty about AV introduction on roads and their interaction with other vehicles and users. In this paper, a methodology to predict the impact of AVs is proposed, relying on Safety Performance Functions (SPFs). An ad hoc SPF for AVs has been developed just for multivehicle crashes, based on a set of market penetration rates, to propose a mathematical model that can include recent technological innovations in road traffic and be adapted to other contexts. Considering the area of the Province of Bari and three different time horizons, crashes were simulated with the presence of AVs in different traffic scenarios. The proposed scenarios were taken from extensive literature studies about the deployment of AVs. The SPF for the predicted crashes was developed by adding one coefficient that considers the presence of AVs to the baseline equation, controlling for the road geometry. The fitted models show a satisfactory goodness-of-fit, based on different metrics, including CuRe (Cumulative Residuals) plots.
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Author Biographies
Stefano Coropulis, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy
Stefano Coropulis received his PhD at the Politecnico di Bari and currently covers the role of Junior Assistant Professor at the same university. His research interests cover traf-fic safety, road geometry design, road pavements, and traffic calming. Since 2019, he has been working on autonomous vehicles and their impact on safety.
CRediT contribution: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Software, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing.
Nicola Berloco, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy
Nicola Berloco works as Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Bari. He is an expert on sus-tainable mobility and traffic calming measures, working on this topic for years. His expertise also covers different areas of infrastructure knowledge, such as road design, and road safety.
CRediT contribution: Investigation, Resources, Validation, Visualization, Writing—review & editing.
Paolo Intini, University of Salento, Italy
Paolo Initni is an Assistant Professor at the University of Salento. He received his PhD at Politecnico di Bari working on road safety and drivers’ familiarity. His research interests cover road safety and road geometry design. He collaborated with international researchers and institutions to focus on specific fields of research in the area of road infrastructure.
CRediT contribution: Data curation, Formal analysis, Supervision, Validation, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing.
Vittorio Ranieri, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy
Professor Vittorio Ranieri is the head of the Road, Railways, and Airports group research at Politec-nico di Bari. His research interests range from road pavement to road safety, tackling topics regarding sustainable mobility, traffic calming, and especially road design. He collaborated with several international Universities for different research topics and developments in the field of Roads.
CRediT contribution: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Writing—review & editing.
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