Novel Method of Obtaining Critical Parameter in Safety Assessment for Maintenance Work Zone

Safety assessment of maintenance work zone is crucial for the safety of conservation personnel and traveling vehicles. To make up for the limitations of current methods to do timely safety assessment for maintenance work zones, this paper makes full use of the existing safety assessment theory, and proposes a method based on naturalistic driving study, automatic segmentation technology and spatial clustering analysis to obtain the critical parameter of a classic safety assessment model. Firstly, vehicle behavior data is collected by naturalistic driving method; secondly, using the automatic segmentation technology, the fragments containing traffic conflict information in the data are extracted; these fragments are then clustered by kernel density analysis to find the location of the high density point of traffic conflict; finally, the critical parameter is calculated, that is, the geometric relationship between the location and the maintenance work zone; then, input the critical parameter into the classic safety assessment method so as to achieve the purpose of safety assessment for maintenance work zone. Practice has proved that the key parameter obtaining method proposed in this paper fully takes into account the characteristics of maintenance work zones; it can collect the behavior data of vehicles passing through quickly and flexibly, then makes a timely safety assessment for the zone, thus can better meet the actual needs of maintenance.