Safety Assessment of Exit Advance Guide Signs in Mountainous Highway Tunnel Based on Eye-Tracking Technology

Hao Lu,Peng Wu,Ting Shang,Yi Wei

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3099735

Hao Lu, Peng Wu + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3099735

Copy DOI

Abstract

Exit Advance Guide Signs play an important role in driving safety on highway tunnels. With the increase of mountain highway in recent 10 years, how to set exit advance guide signs inside the mountain highway tunnels become a new problem in China. This paper evaluates the effects of setting schemes of Exit Advance Guide Signs in mountain tunnels through simulation experiments. Specially, exit advance guide signs in the mountainous highway tunnel were divided into location sign and distance sign. Six schemes of different height, width and spacing were tested, in which the distance sign was on the left or right wall of the tunnel, and the vehicle was on the left lane. A Markov chain was used to analyze the driver's eye movement characteristics to evaluate the effect of separate guide signs. The results were as follows: if the distance sign was set on the left wall, the scheme 4 where height, width and spacing of 1.5m was the best choice, because the change rate of the driver's pupil area was higher than the threshold, attention to distance signs increased to 10.42%, and dashboard gaze also increased. These characteristics show that the traffic sign setting effect was obvious, and didn't affect the driver's driving safety; if the distance sign was set on the right wall, the scheme 6 where height, width and spacing of 2m was the best choice, because drivers pay the highest attention to area 5 and it did not exceed 60%, Meanwhile, the driver's fixation distribution of scheme 6 was the most stable. This study can optimize exit advance guide signs setting in the mountainous highway tunnel, then contributing to reduced traffic accidents and making mountain highway transport more sustainable.

Highlights

Exit advance guide sign (EAGS) is an important highway infrastructure in driving guidance, which can warn drivers to slow down to ensure the driving safety
The driver’s visual recognition of traffic signs can be divided into two stages: "perception" and "recognition and reading", so 8.88% can be used as the threshold of pupil area change rate
This result showed that when the driver was relatively relaxed, the pupil area change rate would increase as the visibility of the sign increases; In the stage of "both can see the shape of the sign and recognize the content", the driver's pupil area change rate was always greater than the 8.88% threshold line, the deviation was small

Summary

Introduction

Exit advance guide sign (EAGS) is an important highway infrastructure in driving guidance, which can warn drivers to slow down to ensure the driving safety. In U.S regulations, EAGS should be placed 1/2 and 1 mile ahead of the Exit, and the third sign can be placed 2 miles ahead of the Exit if possible. If the distance from the exit is less than 1/2 mile, the sign may be set 1/4 mile ahead of the exit. EAGS should display miles in fractions rather than decimals [1]. In EU rules, EAGS should be placed 1/2 and 1 mile ahead of the Exit [2]. In China, EAGS should be set at 2 km, 1km and 500m ahead of the Exit [3]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion