Exploitable results
Over 42,000 road users are killed in European Union countries annually and around 3.5 million are injured. This accounts for annual costs of over EURO 160 billion, not counting the pain and suffering of victims and their relatives.
Recent studies in one EU Member State show that since 1980, crash safety improvements have reduced causalities by 15 %, drink/driving measures by 11 %, and road safety engineering improvements by 6.5 %. There is clearly considerable untapped potential for a much greater reduction in casualties through adding intelligence to road infrastructure.
Even without safety improvements, European countries are experiencing ever increasing maintenance costs to keep the road network in a good and safe condition. The reasons for this are increased traffic volume combined with accelerated damage to road surfaces and structures due to increased gross weights and evolution of load configurations of heavy goods vehicles. With the demand for increased freight transport increasing substantially, this situation will get worse instead of better unless new approaches can be found to increase the capacity and improve the maintenance through added intelligence to existing roads rather than new roads.
In these circumstances, the target set by the EC of a 50 % reduction in road deaths by 2010, is ambitious and is a major challenge for the road research community as well as the road authorities and operators.
An innovative integration of existing sensor and communication technologies with road infrastructure is one way of reaching the twin goals of increased safety and increased capacity. For a relatively small cost, significant 'added value' can be obtained from existing infrastructure, achieving a cost effective solution to the problem.
The INTRO project aimed to address the needs of road operators and users in terms of dealing with the following main aspects:
- driver awareness of sudden changes in road safety conditions;
- driver and road operator information on pavement safety and capacity including its optimisation; and
- real-time information for road operator based on traffic data and safety status.
The INTRO project focused on applying and combining existing and new sensor technologies in a holistic way in order to significantly increase road capacity and safety as well as to improve the well-being of road users.
A large amount of sensor/data input is already available, e.g. road surface databases, in-situ sensors in road pavements and bridges (weigh-in-motion, WIM), strain gauges, optical fibre technologies, etc. as well as an increased number of in-vehicle sensors developed by the car industry. A significant success factor for such sensor technologies to be utilised in a larger scale and to be economically feasible is the increasing capacity of European telecommunication networks (GPRS, 3G) and satellite navigation systems (Galileo).
INTRO made combined use of real-time network technologies, road databases and sensor technologies in order to create timely and local information of the infrastructure improving both road safety and capacity. The information is aggregated and visualised in order to optimise needs of the road user as well the road operator and road authorities.
The main technical work focuses on solutions through research and development in the following three areas:
- novel methods of surface safety monitoring;
- pavement conditions (from intelligent pavements and intelligent vehicles);
INTRO developed a new method for estimating travel time from unidentified probe vehicle data. The results based on simulated data showed that the method generally performs better compared to existing piecewise constant vehicle profile method. Results for identified probe vehicle method, validated against automatic vehicle identification data, showed the mean error for speed estimated is low (5.1 - 5.8 km/h).
Data fusion is an appealing data processing technique to take into account data qualities and imperfections of each source. INTRO demonstrated that the fusion of traffic loop data and toll collection data, improves both the accuracy and the robustness of travel time estimation.
Weather conditions influence how drivers behave. INTRO research showed on Polish roads, free flow speed decreases during rain and snow conditions. However, speed difference on Swiss motorways during fine and inclement weather is relatively small. One reason could be the quality of the road. It also raised the question whether Swiss drivers are keeping sufficient safe distance during inclement weather.
INTRO driving simulator study of fog showed that drivers' time headway when following a vehicle at 30 m visibility is less than when the visibility is 60 m. One of the reasons is that drivers are looking for a visual frame, i.e. the tail light of the lead vehicle, and at 30 m visibility it means that following vehicles are driving too close.
If a system could monitor traffic risk and inform drivers to the appropriate action to take, it would reduce accidents and road fatalities. INTRO has developed safety indicators for monitoring traffic risk and preliminary results on the sensitivity of the safety indicators using field data have been encouraging.
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