This paper has been handled by associate editor Tony Sze.The application of novel connected vehicles emulated data on real-time crash potential prediction for arterials

摘要

Real-time crash potential prediction could provide valuable information for Active Traffic Management Systems. Fixed infrastructure-based vehicle detection devices were widely used in the previous studies to obtain different types of data for crash potential prediction. However, it was difficult to obtain data in large range through these devices due to the costs of installation and maintenance. This paper introduced a novel connected vehicle (CV) emulated data for real-time crash potential prediction. Different from the fixed devices' data, CV emulated data have high flexibility and can be obtained continuously with relatively low cost. Crash and CV emulated data were collected from two urban arterials in Orlando, USA. Crash data were archived by the Signal for Analytics system (S4A), while the CV emulated data were obtained through the data collection API with a high frequency. Different data cleaning and preparation techniques were implemented, while various speed-related variables were generated from the CV emulated data. A Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) neural network was trained to predict the crash potential in the next 5-10 min. The results from the model illustrated the feasibility of using a novel CV emulated data to predict real-time crash potential. The average and 50th percentile speed were the two most important variables for the crash potential prediction. In addition, the proposed LSTM outperformed Bayesian logistics regression and XGBoost in terms of sensitivity, Area under Curve (AUC), and false alarm rate. With the rapid development of the connected vehicle systems, the results from this paper can be extended to other types of vehicles and data, which can significantly enhance traffic safety.