Use of GRA to evaluate road traffic safety strategies

Large-scale implementation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) applications and extensive redesign of the physical road infrastructure are two of the main approaches to improve road traffic safety. These strategies may be to a large extent substitutes, but also partly complementary. The possible match of both sets of measures has been studied, and some possible scenarios for their implementation have been drafted, with regard to costs as well as social, environmental and economic effects (costs and benefits). A notorious problem is the ex-ante evaluation of such scenarios. Many different evaluation methods exist, each with their advantages and limitations. The abundance of methods is clearly a measure for the difficulty of the evaluation problem. This paper reviews some of the methods most commonly used in transportation research and proposes a first-time application of mathematics based grey relational analysis (GRA) method for (ADAS and/or infrastructure) strategy selection in the area of traffic safety