Light trucks have doubled their share of the vehicle fleet from 1980 to 2004. This paper examines the effects of this increase on traffic safety, combining estimates from a state-level panel data set with an accident-level micro-data set. The results suggest that a one-percentage point increase in light truck share raises annual traffic fatalities by 0.34%, or 143 deaths per year. Of this incre...

The state of the art in traffic incident detection is dominated by approaches that require significant manual tuning. Our hypothesis is that these time-consuming solutions can be sucessfuly eliminated with the help of machine learning methods and past traffic data collected nowadays on major highways. We show that combining the output of a set of simple, imperfectly tuned, “offthe-shelf” detect...

This paper investigates differentiated design standards as a source of capacity additions that are more affordable and have smaller aesthetic and environmental impacts than modern expressways. We consider several tradeoffs, including narrow versus wide lanes and shoulders on an expressway of a given total width, and high-speed expressway versus lower-speed arterial. We quantify the situations i...

Networks of various kinds often experience anomalous behaviour. Examples include attacks or large data transfers in IP networks, presence of intruders in distributed video surveillance systems, and an automobile accident or an untimely congestion in a road network. Machine learning techniques enable the development of anomaly detection algorithms that are non-parametric, adaptive to changes in ...

Winter weather can be a significant cause of road traffic accidents. This paper uses UKCIP climate change scenarios and a temporal analogue to investigate the relationship between temperature and severe road accidents in the West Midlands, UK. This approach also allows quantification of the changes in the severity of the winter season over the next century in the region. It is demonstrated that...

Since highway improvement project selection requires screening thousands of road segments with respect to crashes for further analysis and final project selection, we provide a two-step project selection methodology and describe an application case to demonstrate its advantages. In the first step of the proposed methodology, we will use odds against observing a given crash count, injury count, ...

The behavior of vehicular traffic is subject to many irregularities and stochastic fluctuations. Thus, our success in solving a variety of traffic management and optimizations tasks, such as accident detection or optimal vehicle routing, depends heavily on our ability to adequately model, reason about and predict such a behavior. The objective of this work is to develop a probabilistic model of...

Coordination is an essential ingredient of joint activity in humanagent-robot teams. In this paper, we discuss some of the challenges and requirements for successful coordination, and briefly how we have used KAoS HART services framework to support coordination in a multi-team humanrobot field exercise.

Application of Executive Order 12898 to risk assessment of highway or rail transport of hazardous materials has proven difficult; in general, the location and conditions affecting the propagation of a plume of hazardous material released in a potential accident are unknown. Therefore, analyses have only been possible in a geographically broad or approximate manner. The advent of geographic info...

Anterior traumatic dislocations of the hip are much less common than posterior dislocations. To date, 14 cases of open anterior dislocation of the hip associated with such injuries, acetabular and femoral head fractures and femoral vascular and nerve damage have been reported. We present a case of a 23-year-old male who sustained open anterior dislocation of the hip with ipsilateral fracture of...