Micro-Simulation Model for Assessing the Risk of Vehicle-Pedestrian Road Accidents

Data on traffic accidents clearly point to road black spots, where the accident rate is always high. However, road safety research is still far from understanding why these particular places on a road are risky. The reason is the lack of sufficient knowledge on how pedestrians and drivers interact when facing a potentially dangerous traffic situation, and the lack of an integrated framework that relates the data on human behavior to real-world traffic situations. We attempt to tackle this problem by developing SAFEPED, a multi-agent microscopic three-dimensional (3D) simulation of vehicle and pedestrian dynamics at a black spot. SAFEPED is a test platform for evaluating experimentally estimated drivers' and pedestrians' behavioral rules, and estimating accident risks in different traffic situations. It aims to analyze the design of existing and future black spots and to assess alternative architectural and environmental solutions in order to identify maximally efficient safety countermeasures.