Integrating highway alignment design capability to the Interactive Highway Safety Design Model (IHSDM): a two-lane highway case study

Abstract

Interactive Highway Safety Design Model (IHSDM) is a software analysis and decision-support tool that is widely used to check design consistency in response to required safety and operational performance level along two-lane rural highways. It can only identify the inconsistent sections along a given highway. Therefore, after every check, the inconsistent sections are redesigned and checked again to ensure consistency. This process is manual and is time consuming. The objective of this research is to incorporate the highway alignment design capability to the IHSDM. This will reduce the manual repetitive steps involved in highway design and safety checks. In this study highway geometric design properties are used and integrated with IHSDM such that the inconsistent sections of the highway are replaced with sections having optimal safety and operational performance level. This method first identifies the inconsistent sections from the given highway alignment using IHSDM and then replaces the sections with new, and more appropriate sections. This process continues until all inconsistent sections are replaced. A real-world problem is solved in this paper using the proposed method.