UofM Research Center Partners with FedEx and TDOT

C-TIER leads project to enhance traffic safety at roadside work zones

The Center for Transportation Innovations Education and Research (C-TIER) PIs, Dr. Sabya Mishra and Dr. Mihalis Golias, both professors in Civil Engineering are the researchers that will work on the project “Informed Safety, Mobility, and Driver Comfort Enhancement Practices for Work Zones: Learnings from High-Fidelity Data” to enhance work zone safety. This project is jointly sponsored by FedEx and Tennessee Department of Transportation.

Work zones have long been cited as a potential cause of road fatalities and traffic delays and work zones have a deleterious effect on mobility, safety, and comfort, evidenced by the ever-increasing frequency of crashes and delays. Substantial research has aimed at enhancing safety and mobility around work zones for passing vehicles and workers. Moreover, there is a need to evaluate various vehicle dynamics as they pass different work zone elements and their potentially detrimental consequences. In recent times, vehicles are equipped with various devices and have the potential to collect high-fidelity data on individual vehicle actions as they pass through various work zones. Such data sets can be used to enhance safety around work zones.

Figure showing working zone sensors to collect data.

This project aims to collect precise vehicle data such as location, speed, acceleration, and heading through the use of multiple onboard sensors. From the traffic videos from onboard cameras, data related to surrounding traffic, such as spacing with the neighboring vehicle, relative/ average speed of neighboring vehicles, and offset distance from the work zone boundary, will be extracted. The collected data will be used to (i) establish the relationship between crashes and hard braking events, (ii) derive work zone performance measures related to safety, mobility, and driver comfort, and (iii) recommend crash evasion actions.

The project is expected to have far-reaching practical implications. Mishra said “The project will help us to identify appropriate performance measures to quantify safety, mobility, and driver comfort while driving through a work zone, and will provide us comprehensive knowledge of vehicle’s interaction pattern with various work zone types. At the end of this project, we will be able to provide recommendation of signage placement to enhance safety, mobility, and driver comfort.”

For more information on this project, contact Mishra at smishra3@memphis.edu, or Golias at mgkolias@memphis.edu.