Probabilistic Safety Analysis using Traffic Microscopic Simulation

Traffic microscopic simulation applications are a common tool in road transportation analysis and several attempts to perform road safety assessments have recently been carried out. However, these approaches often ignore causal relationships between different levels of vehicle interactions and/or accident types and they lack a physical representation of the accident phenomena itself. In this paper, a new generic probabilistic safety assessment framework for traffic microscopic simulation tools is proposed. The probability of a specific accident occurring is estimated by an accident propensity function that consists of a deterministic safety score component and a random component. The formulation of the safety score depends on the type of occurrence, on detailed vehicle interactions and maneuvers and on its representation in a simulation environment. This generic model is applied to the case of an urban motorway and specified to four types of outcomes: non-accident events and three types of accidents in a nested structure: rear-end, lane-changing, and run-off-road accidents. The model was estimated and validated using simulated microscopic data. To obtained the consistent simulated data, a two-step simulation calibration procedure was adopted: (1) using real trajectories collected on site for detailed behavior representation; and (2) using aggregate data from each event used in safety model estimation. The final estimated safety model is able to identify and interpret several simulated vehicle interactions. The fact that these outcomes were extracted from simulated analysis shows the real potential of calibrated traffic microscopic simulation for detailed safety assessments.