Avaliação do impacto da inserção de veículos autônomos em via arterial no desempenho da segurança viária

Abstract

The development and application of intelligent transport systems are responsible for significantchanges in the logistics of urban and road traffic. The autonomous vehicle (AV) is an exampleof this technology, which can be described as a vehicle capable of driving almost or totallyindependent of the human driver, and they are expected to be participating in traffic at relevantpenetrations in the coming decades. In relation to road safety performance, it is expected thatin a scenario of total automation, traffic accidents will be reduced, since failures in the drivingprocess are present in the contributing factors of 94% of current traffic accidents. However, untilAVs are majority, there will be a transition period in which AVs and conventional vehicles willinteract, and the present work aims to understand how these interactions will be characterized inan urban environment. Since observational studies are not applicable, due to the still inexpressiveAV penetration in the roads and the consequent lack of historical claims data, microsimulationwas used as an analysis tool for the transition scenarios. In order to represent the behavior of AVsin the simulation, parameters calibrated by the CoExist project were adopted. The road safetyperformance evaluation used the software Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM) to verifythe number of vehicular conflicts in the trajectory file exported by VISSIM, and this analysiswas based in two surrogate safety measures, TTC and MaxS, to understand the severity of theseconflicts. It was possible to verify a limited capacity of VISSIM to represent automation, and amore detailed representation is dependent on External Driver Model Application ProgrammingInterface. The results obtained indicated that a cautious driving behaviour attributed to the AVis capable of reducing up to 42% the number of conflicts in relation to the base scenario. Acounter intuitive result was obtained: AVs with a more aggressive driving mode increases thenumber of conflicts by up to 87.6%. The severity of possible accidents consequent from conflictswas mitigated with the presence of AVs in traffic, as there was a reduction of up to 23% in themaximum speed of the vehicles involved in the conflict.