Surrogate Measuring of Connected Vehicle's Operational Impact on Traffic Safety

摘要

The paper presents an innovative method to disclose and quantify the cause-and-effect mechanism between such a connected vehicle (CV) behavior performance and the traffic safety of a highway facility by using a safety surrogate approach. In this study, the CV-affected driving behavior parameters are integrated into the state-of-the-art traffic simulation model, in which the interactions between the CV functional attributes (e.g., CV function type, message type, message timing, and drivers' compliance level to CV messages) and drivers' behavior attributes (e.g., perception-reaction time, desired speed, and desired following distance) can be virtually observed and determined. The developed system is examined via a case study of a freeway site in the Cincinnati area, Ohio. The results indicate that the CV-affected reaction time, desired headway, and speed are responsible for the reduction of the traffic conflicting frequency and intensity, which are insightful to the successful deployment of the CV safety technologies into the existing highway systems.