Integrating safety and mobility for pathfinding using big data generated by connected vehicles

Abstract

With the emergence of the internet of things, pathfinding problems have recently received a significant amount of attention. Various commercial applications provide automated routing by considering travel time, travel distance, fuel consumption, complexity of the road, etc. However, many of these prospective applications do not consider route safety. Emergence of high-resolution big data generated by connected vehicles (CV) helps us to integrate safety into routing problem. The goal of this study is to address safety aspects in pathfinding problems by developing a methodological framework that simultaneously considers safety and mobility. To reach this goal, the concept of volatility is utilized as a surrogate safety performance measure to quantify route safety and driver behavior. The proposed framework uses CV big data and real-time traffic data to calculate safety indices and travel times. Measured safety indices include 5-year crash history, route speed and acceleration volatility, and driver volatility. Travel time and safety shape a cost function called “route impedance.” The algorithm has the flexibility for the user to predefine the weight for safety consideration. It also uses driver volatility to automatically increase safety weight for volatile drivers. To illustrate the algorithm, a numerical example is provided using an origin-destination pair in Ann Arbor, MI, and more than 42 million CV observations from around 2,500 CVs from the Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) were analyzed. The sensitivity analysis is performed to discuss the impact of penetration rate of CVs and time of the trip on the results. Finally, this paper shows suggested routes for multiple scenarios to demonstrate the outcome of the study. The results revealed that the algorithm might suggest different routes when considering safety indices and not just travel time.