Identification of accident-prone sections in roadways with incomplete and uncertain inspection-based information: A distributed hazard index based on evidential reasoning approach

Aliasghar Sadeghi, Hamid Farhad, Abolfazl Mohammadzadeh Moghaddam and Morteza Jalili Qazizadeh

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2018, vol. 178, issue C, 278-289

Abstract: Identification of accident-prone road segments based on the results of safety inspection is a widely accepted method for prioritization of safety improvement efforts particularly for low volume traffic roadways. In the existing methods, the items listed in a risk factor checklist are given qualitative or exact scores and then risk items are aggregated without considering the uncertainty in the subjective judgment of the inspector. Other shortcomings include the failure to consider the relative importance of risk factors and the failure to provide a solution to deal with absence or incompleteness of data. This study introduces a method of road safety evaluation and a distributed hazard index (DHI) based on evidential reasoning approach. This approach allows the risk factor to be expressed by several degrees with different values of confidence instead of one definite figure. By adjustment for the extent of user exposure and the approach of road safety authority to improvement, the distributed index is turned into the Hazard Index (HI), which serves as measure for final prioritization of road sections. The proposed method is applied to a case study and the resulting sections ranking show good consistence with the results of empirical Bayesian method based on accident records.

Keywords: Evidential reasoning; Road safety; Distributed hazard index; Uncertain inspection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832017313893
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:178:y:2018:i:c:p:278-289

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2018.06.020

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().