Key Factors and Representative Scenarios in Work Zone Safety: Indiana Crash Data Analysis

Work zones are unique construction sites having multiple elements and complex scenarios. Existing studies have utilized crash data to explore the key factors contributing to work zone crashes. However, studies covering various elements comprehensively are missing, especially in Indiana. Also, there is a lack of studies exploring how to identify the representative scenarios from a large number of work zone crashes. Thus, this study aims to investigate the key factors contributing to work zone crashes covering multiple elements and propose a procedure to select representative scenarios based on crash data. Three Indiana crash data resources and the Natural Language Processing method were applied. There are several key findings. The key factors from multiple resources were summarized, including road conditions, work zone elements, and environment. Traffic activities were the top factors, followed by construction vehicles and weather conditions. Then, a seven-step procedure to extract the representative scenarios from crash records was proposed. Applying the procedure, two representative cases were identified from Indiana crash data. The study enhances the comprehensive understanding of work zone crashes based on large- scale data and helps improve safety for workers, drivers, and pedestrians.