The UK’s Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) has launched its new advanced vehicle technology route risk assessment tool at this year’s Highways UK event which is taking place at the NEC in Birmingham this week.
The Highways UK show is a flagship event for roads and transport in the country, bringing together a wide range of stakeholders involved in planning, designing, building and operating new technology for use on the UK’s urban roads and Strategic Road Network. The new TRL tool enables collision risk to be calculated route-by-route and adjusted depending on different in-car technologies. This critical new tool is ideal for local authorities, national road authorities, fleet managers, insurance companies and automotive manufacturers, all of which have significant interest in understanding more about the risks associated with any given route across the UK, and how these risks are changing with ever more sophisticated driving technologies.
Using TRL’s new route risk tool, organizations will be able to map routes across the UK and see the collision risk specific to that route. In addition, users can choose from and assess the impact of a variety of vehicle technologies and safety measures, so that the impacts of the adoption of different technologies can be seen for the specific routes or areas of interest. A user can:
- See collision risks per vehicle mile or km for each technology measure in operation;
- Observe changes in risk following the enablement of each vehicle technology to analyze which measures have the most and least effect;
- Compare multiple routes based on the risk assessment.
The tool is driven by TRL’s research and in-depth accident reconstructions using information from the Road Accident In-Depth Study (RAIDs) collision investigation database which TRL manages for the UK’s Department for Transport (DfT). The tool was developed as part of the Driven automated vehicle project, a £13.6m (US$17.4m) initiative with matched funding from UK Research and Innovation’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. The new tool is part of TRL’s program of strategically investing, producing disruptive research and delivering innovation linked to:
- Connected and self-driving vehicles;
- Ultra-low emission technologies;
- Shared mobility services;
- Intelligent asset information;
- Big data, machine learning & artificial intelligence.
“This new advanced vehicle technology route risk tool has been developed to help the wider automotive community understand and assess the possibility of future collision risks,” said Ciaran Ellis, TRL’s senior data scientist. “With an ability to assess the impact of a wide array of in-vehicle technologies, this new tool can provide organizations with the data to map out the safest routes, and to identify the vehicle technologies that enable the safest journeys. At this year’s Highways UK, we will be holding demonstrations of this new tool, allowing visitors to the TRL stand the opportunity to observe how we can not only assess the risks on any given route, but also see what impact certain advanced vehicle technologies have on mitigating hazards In addition, this will also be an opportunity to discuss how this device can be useful for different industries, thanks to its ability to be tailored to individual requirements.”
