고속도로 자율주행 도입에 따른 잠재적 교통안전 개선 효과분석에 관한 연구

초록

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are expected to show more stable driving behavior than manual vehicles (MVs), which results in higher possibility of improving safety in the traffic flow. In uninterrupted mixed traffic flow, vehicle interactions between AVs and MVs occur in car following situations. These car following situations are categorized into four different types such as AV-AV pair, MV-AV pair, AV-MV pair, and MV-MV pair. The four types of car following situations in the mixed traffic flows are expected to have different safety characteristics due to differences in the driving behavior of each driving pair. The purpose of this study is to develop a methodology to quantitatively identify the potential improvement of traffic safety benefits based on the analysis of mixed car following situations on freeways. In this study, a multi-agent driving simulator (MADS) was used to collect driving behavior information and analyze driving safety in mixed car following situations. A novel measure, referred to as safety improvement score (SIS), is proposed as a part of the proposed methodology to evaluate the impact of introducing AVs on traffic safety. Results show that freeway hazardous spots and sections are observed at interchanges, deceleration lanes, and acceleration lanes, in which merging and diverging events occurs frequently. The largest safety improvement based on SIS due to AVs is achievable in the entry and exit situations of freeway interchanges, and the safety improvement is less effective on freeway mainlines such as straight and curved sections. In particular, the following MV in AV-MV pair on straight sections was analyzed to have less safety improvement due to the low compliance with the conservative driving behavior of the leading AV. The results of this study are expected to be used to facilitate the development of autonomous driving technologies and to identify road sections where road safety facilities, including infrastructure-based AV guidance information, need to be installed.

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