Evaluation of Two Improved Schemes at Non-Aligned Intersections Affected by a Work Zone with an Entropy Method

Towards smart work zones: Creating safe and efficient work zones in the technology era

INTRODUCTION

Work Zones (WZs) have long been identified as a source of traffic fatalities and delays. Despite considerable technological advances that have alleviated many operational challenges associated with a WZ, social concerns about safety and mobility near WZs remain. Notably, the concept of a Smart Work Zone (SWZ) emerged from the compelling need to improve the safety and mobility of traffic and other WZ participants. This study reviewed the literature to assimilate studies related to SWZ Systems (SWZSs), report their findings, and ascertain a future path forward.

METHOD

To accomplish this, the existing WZ-related literature base was clustered into safety and traffic mobility topics using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling. A thorough investigation of the pivotal inferences for the research topics was undertaken to comprehend current SWZ technologies and the need for further research.

RESULTS

The review uncovered the prominent features of SWZSs reported in the literature and the hindrances to their adoption. The most reported hindrances are the cost and effort associated with development, installation, and relocation. We uncover that Connected Autonomous Vehicles, vehicle-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, along with technology-based worker training are the most promising next frontier for SWZ.

CONCLUSION

Significant research gaps exist in the literature regarding developing and implementing SWZS. Additionally, little effort has been directed toward developing workers' skills and competency. Practical approaches such as Virtual Reality (VR)-based training are necessary to bring workers up to pace with the developing SWZ technologies.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

Future research should be directed towards interconnecting and implementing available safety technologies to automate WZ safety and management. Workers should be trained using more practical techniques. In this context, using VR will enable the simulation of hazardous events in a safe environment while also improving workers' skill retention.

Evaluating Operational Features of Three Unconventional Intersections under Heavy Traffic Based on CRITIC Method

Conventional four-legged intersections are inefficient under heavy traffic requirements and are prone to congestion problems. Unconventional intersections with innovative designs allow for more efficient traffic operations and can increase the capacity of the intersection, in some cases. Common unconventional designs for four-legged intersections include the upstream signalized crossover intersection (USC), continuous flow intersection (CFI), and parallel flow intersection (PFI). At present, an increasing number of cities are using such unconventional designs to improve the performance of their intersections. In the reconstruction of original intersections or the design of new intersections, the question of how to more reasonably select the form of unconventional intersection becomes particularly critical. Therefore, we selected a typical intersection in Xi’an for optimization and investigated traffic data for this intersection. The traffic operations, with respect to the four solutions of a conventional intersection, USC, CFI, and PFI, were evaluated using the VISSIM software. Then, we evaluated the suitability of each solution under different situations using the CRITIC (CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) method, which is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method that enables a more comprehensive and integrated evaluation of the four solutions by taking into account the comparative intensities and conflicting character among the indices. The results show that the conventional intersection is only applicable to the case of very low traffic volume; PFI has the advantage in the case of moderate and high traffic volume; CFI performs better in the case of high traffic volume; and USC is generally inferior to CFI and PFI, although it has greater improvement, compared with the conventional solution, in a few cases.