Safety

Georgia’s Emergency Motorist Aid Call Box Pilot Project, the first call box system in the State, was installed in May 1999 to determine its effectiveness in providing emergency service to stranded motorists in Georgia. A total of 147 call boxes were installed on one of the most rural sections of Interstate in Georgia. The project is 39 miles in length and is located within Troup, Harris and Muscogee Counties on I-185.

The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) was interested in determining the benefits and effectiveness of the system. Based on this evaluation, GDOT will determine whether it would be beneficial to install call boxes in other areas of the state.

TransCore

Georgia Department of Transportation

Presented at the 10th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, May 1-4, 2000 Boston, MA

A novel, engineering-based methodology is described which estimates the effectiveness and predicts the safety benefits of intelligent vehicle safety systems. The safety benefits are expressed in terms of the number of collisions that might be avoided if drivers were assisted by such systems. This methodology utilizes as input non-crash data collected from field operational tests, which characterize driver/vehicle performance in distinct safety-critical driving conflicts with and without the assistance of intelligent vehicle safety systems. Crash data are non-existent during the conduct of field operational tests that normally employ few instrumented vehicles operating for a relatively short period of time. In support of this novel methodology, dominant driving conflicts leading to rear-end, single vehicle roadway departure, and lane change collisions are defined and ranked in terms of the relative frequency of occurrence using national crash databases. Moreover, the quantification of boundaries between benign and safety-critical driving conflicts is proposed based on the 95th percentile values of driver reaction time and vehicle acceleration level exhibited in extreme collision avoidance maneuvers. Finally, the formulation and calibration of mathematical models is discussed, which estimate the probability of a crash in a safey-critical driving conflict.

Volpe National Transportation Systems Center

Presented at the 10th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, May 1-4, 2000 Boston, MA

Presentation

• Need

– For forward collision warning applications, need accurate estimation of host vehicle forward path and state to determine in-path vs. out-of-path vehicles

– Single sensor systems (gyro, vision, GPS, radar) have high error and drop-out rates due to sensor limitations and degradations (weather, visibility, traffic density, road state, buildings, etc.)

– Multi-sensor systems could potentially increase accuracy, but need smart fusion methods to handle individual sensor drop-outs and incomplete/redundant/contradictory outputs

• Objectives

– Develop algorithms to fuse multiple sensors to improve accuracy and reliability of host vehicle forward path and state (as part of ACAS-FOT program)

• Status

– Multi-sensor fusion module completed and integrated into ACAS-FOT prototype vehicle (Phase 1 testing complete)

HRL Laboratories, LLC

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 29 –May 2, 2002 Long Beach, California

Winter maintenance operations, including snow removal, are subject to increased risk by conditions such as total visual whiteout, low traction on wet or icy pavement, drifting snow and roadways completely covered by snow. Additional hazards are posed by objects buried in or obscured by snow. Furthermore, snowplow operators often lack important visual cues as to their position on the roadway due to accumulations of snow from previous plowing activities. In many of the colder, mountainous states, snowplows that run off the roadway have greater potential for equipment damage and personal injury due to the mountainous terrain in which much of the snow removal operations take place. The opportunity to address these risks with Advanced Vehicle Control and Safety Systems (AVCSS) technologies was the impetus for the Advanced Snowplow Development and Demonstration project. These AVCSS technologies have been incorporated into the United States Department of Transportation.s (USDOT) Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI) program.

The main purpose of the Advanced Snowplow Development and Demonstration project was to design, integrate and test AVCSS technologies on snowplow maintenance equipment. This phase of the project has attempted to assess potential benefits associated with combining conventional snowplow operations with Intelligent Vehicle (IV) technologies in terms of improved efficiency and safety on rural roadway segments in California and Arizona. A prototype snowplow was equipped with lateral lane indication and forward collision warning systems. The subsequent evaluation attempted to determine the effectiveness of the advanced technology system in terms of safety and operational efficiency, as well as perceived benefits or concerns expressed by the snowplow operators. In addition, the accuracy and reliability of the system was examined.

The results of this initial evaluation will first, provide the results necessary to determine the feasibility of AVCSS in improving safety and efficiency of snowplow removal and second, help establish a methodology for future AVCSS evaluation projects.

Montana State University – Bozeman: Western Transportation Institute

Presented at the 10th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, May 1-4, 2000 Boston, MA

The Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT), the Minnesota State Patrol (MSP) and the Mayo Emergency Communications Center (MECC) teamed up with Veridian Engineering to develop an emergency communications infrastructure not only capable of directly accepting Mayday calls, but intelligent enough to accurately route calls to the proper authority depending on the geographic location of the incident.

Mayday Plus proved the operational success of the technologies developed during the project. The in-vehicle equipment proved the capability of sending three types of manual emergency requests and automatic notification in the case of simulated crash events. Dispatchers receiving Mayday Plus calls were able to quickly and efficiently locate incidents and forward data and calls as necessary to other agencies. However, in comparison to actual cellular 9-1-1 calls where the dispatcher must rely on the caller to obtain accurate location information, the complete location and crash data message sent by the Mayday Plus system proved to be slower. Minor changes to the design of the communication system are expected to improve this result. Nonetheless, while it cannot be a substitute for human intervention, it proved the success of providing accurate and relevant information that could further improve the quality of response to incidents. As well, in situations where the victim is unable to effectively communicate, it could possibly provide life-saving data.

Castle Rock Consultants

Presented at the 10th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, May 1-4, 2000 Boston, MA