Safety indicators for microsimulation-based assessments

In the field of ITS applications evaluation, micro-simulation is becoming more and more a useful and powerful tool. In the evaluation process, one of the most important steps is the safety analysis. For that purpose, classical micro-simulation outputs give some helpful information, but which aren’t sufficient for an accurate analysis in many cases. Nevertheless, the microscopic level of traffic description offers the possibility of tracking the simulated vehicles getting at each time step their relative position, speed and deceleration. This paper explains how a safety indicator can be calculated with these different parameters. This safety indicator is used in a ramp metering case study to illustrate the utility of such output for a safety analysis. However, this indicator is limited to the linear collision probability and gives therefore no information on crossing trajectories conflicts like in junctions. On the other hand the likelihood of an incident to happen depends not only on traffic conditions but on the influence of many other factors as for example the geometry of the road, the visibility or the pavement conditions (wet, dry, etc.). When significant statistical information is available an estimation of the probability of an incident to happen can be computed, and used in microsimulation analysis. The paper is completed with the development and testing of hierarchical logit based model to estimate this probability.Peer Reviewe