A Knowledge-Based Expert System for Pedestrian Safety Improvement at Intersections
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Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2023-06-01
Type of Work
Department
Urban Mobility & Equity Center
Program
Citation of Original Publication
Rights
Public Domain Mark 1.0
Abstract
In response to the rising concerns about intersection safety across the United States,
traffic administrators have developed various techniques to create more effective and
targeted improvement projects. Among them, Knowledge-Based Expert Systems
(KBESs) demonstrate the unique advantage of having low requirements for users'
experience and efficient decision-making. Recognizing that existing KBESs often lack
comprehensive analysis of the critical factors contributing to pedestrian-involved
crashes and the capability to optimize countermeasure selection, this study proposes an
enhanced KBES to assist the traffic community in efficiently generating a set of optimal
cost-benefit countermeasures to address pedestrian safety risks at intersections. In the
proposed KBES, the carefully designed knowledge acquisition process fills two
knowledge bases: one containing well-evidenced cause-effect relationships between
contributing factors and corresponding Safety Related Intersection Characteristics
(SRICs), and the other storing various attributes of a comprehensive list of
countermeasures. The first developed inference engine is capable of identifying the
contributing factors at an intersection and innovatively quantifying the impact of each
of them based on the user input of SRICs. The second inference engine optimizes the
countermeasure selection to maximize the expected effectiveness in accurately
targeting the impact of those contributing factors while accounting for both budget
constraints and users' defined priorities among the countermeasures' attributes. The
results of the performance evaluation indicate that the proposed KBES is effective in
analyzing contributing factors and recommending countermeasures and can serve as an
efficient tool for traffic engineers to develop safety improvement projects at
intersections