Simulation-Based Assessment of Vehicle Safety Behavior under Hazardous Driving Conditions

Future sustained economic growth of the nation very much depends on the reliability and efficiency of its highway infrastructure system. Some vehicles, such as trucks, emergency vehicles, and sport utility vehicles, often experience increasing risks of single-vehicle accidents under hazardous driving conditions, such as inclement weather and/or complicated topographical conditions. An advanced simulation-based single-vehicle accident assessment model is developed considering the coupling effects between vehicles and hazardous driving conditions, including wind gust, snow-covered or icy road surface, and/or curving. Compared to existing simulation models, the new model focuses on characterizing the transient process of accidents, introducing new critical variables on assessing the accident risks under more comprehensive hazardous driving conditions and establishing more realistic accident criteria. As a holistic deterministic model, it can be used to provide useful assessment and prevention information for traffic and emergency management. For example, it can be used to define appropriate safe driving speed limits for vulnerable vehicles under normal and extreme conditions and predict potential crash and injury risk of vulnerable drivers. Moreover, the new deterministic vehicle safety behavior simulation model lays a critical basis for future reliability-based studies of single-vehicle accident risks of vulnerable vehicles under hazardous conditions. After the model is introduced, numerical analyses on a typical truck under several representative hazardous scenarios will be conducted for demonstration purposes.