Research: Developing methodologies for automated Network-Wide Road Safety Assessment (NWA) of secondary and urban road infrastructure.
Road infrastructure plays a fundamental role in ensuring the safety and efficiency of transportation systems. While Network-Wide Road Safety Assessment (NWRSA) has become an important approach for identifying road safety risks, existing methodologies have primarily been developed for high-capacity roads, leaving secondary and urban road networks insufficiently addressed despite their complexity and importance within transportation networks.
My research addresses this gap by developing comprehensive methodologies for extending NWRSA to a wider range of road environments. The research investigates systematic, objective, and scalable approaches for identifying and evaluating hazardous road sections, considering the diverse operational and infrastructural characteristics of secondary and urban roads.
The research develops an integrated framework combining reactive and proactive road safety assessment approaches. The reactive component focuses on improving the identification of high-risk locations through road network segmentation, the definition of appropriate reference populations, and the validation of assessment results using statistical methods. The proactive component investigates the development of safety evaluation frameworks for different road classes, including the definition of baseline conditions and the selection of appropriate safety performance indicators and CMFs. Furthermore, the research explores methodologies for integrating reactive and proactive assessments to provide more comprehensive safety rankings. Finally, the research investigates the automation of data collection, analysis, and assessment processes through intelligent data processing and advanced analytical approaches.
The expected outcome of this research is a methodological framework that enables practitioners to perform more comprehensive, reliable, and scalable infrastructure safety assessments. The proposed approaches aim to support the identification of high risk areas for targeted road safety inspections.