Work Zone Safety: Behavioral Analysis with Integration of VR and Hardware in the Loop (HIL)

University Transportation Centers Program2021PDFTech ReportErgan, SemihaKhan, Junaid AhmedBernardes, Suzana DuranZou, ZhengboLu, DanielShen, YubinConnected Cities for Smart Mobility toward Accessible and Resilient Transportation Center (C2SMART)New York UniversityUnited States. Department of Transportation. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and TechnologyUnited States. Department of Transportation. University Transportation Centers (UTC) ProgramConnected Cities for Smart Mobility toward Accessible and Resilient Transportation Center (C2SMART)United StatesApplication programming interfacesBehaviorHardware in the loop simulationTraffic simulationVirtual realityWork zone safetyHeart rateRoad construction workersSensorsWarning signals69A3551747124This study presents the development of an integrated platform that allows a two-way interface between traffic simulation and VR environments. The integrated platform enables both applications to spontaneously interact with each other to represent realistic traffic and work zone conditions in the VR environment. The main contribution of this study is the development of the integrated and immersive platform and its customized API tool, called Traffic Simulation-Virtual Reality Integration (TSVRI). The TSVRI API, which bidirectionally transfers information between simulation and VR in real-time, guarantees that the VR environment represents the dynamic characteristics of the work zone traffic and user interactions are fed back to the simulation model to continuously update the traffic information. The integrated platform was tested in alpha experiments and shown to be effective to reproduce realistic traffic scenarios, scalable to different work zone settings (long-, intermediate-, short-term, or mobile), and is ready to be used in experiments with a higher number of participants with different construction experience.127