Integrating highway alignment design capability to the Interactive Highway Safety Design Model (IHSDM): a two-lane highway case study

摘要

Interactive Highway Safety Design Model (IHSDM) is a suite of software analysis and decision-support tools, widely used to check the design consistency in response to required safety and operational performance level along two-lane rural highways. It can only identify the inconsistent sections along a given highway. Therefore, after every check, the inconsistent sections are redesigned and checked again to ensure consistency. This process is manual and time consuming. The objective of this research is to incorporate the highway alignment design capability to the IHSDM. This will reduce the manual repetitive steps involved in the highway design and checking. In this study we have used highway geometric design properties and integrated it with IHSDM such that the inconsistent sections of the highway are replaced with sections having optimal safety and operational performance level. This method, first identifies the inconsistent sections from the given highway alignment using IHSDM and then replaces them with new, most appropriate sections. This process continues till all inconsistent sections are replaced. A real-world problem is solved in this paper using the proposed method.