Road Safety Analytics Grid for Risk Minimization Routing
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Solution Overview
Problem
The increasing number of vehicle incidents and fatalities in areas with extensive oil and gas operations, such as the Permian basin, due to hazardous driving conditions and infrastructure, necessitates a solution for optimizing vehicle routing and scheduling to minimize safety risks.
Innovation Solution
A method for determining roadway safety by calculating crash values based on incident data, which is used to route vehicles through safer routes, taking into account time, location, and incident severity, and scheduling driving routes to avoid high-risk areas and times, utilizing an analytics module that overlays a grid onto a map and calculates risk scores for each potential route.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If vehicles use traditional routing methods without safety analysis, then routing simplicity is maintained, but vehicle incident risk increases
Solution Approach 1:
The geographic area is divided into a grid of cells, with each cell assigned a crash value based on historical incident data. This segmentation allows the complex safety analysis to be broken down into manageable discrete units that can be easily processed and integrated into routing decisions.
Solution Approach 2:
Crash values are pre-calculated for each grid cell using historical vehicle incident data before routing is performed. This preliminary analysis of safety data allows the routing system to quickly reference pre-computed risk values rather than performing complex safety analyses in real-time, reducing computational complexity during actual routing operations.
2Reliability
If routes are optimized to avoid high-risk areas, then vehicle incident risk decreases, but route length and travel time may increase
Solution Approach 1:
The routing algorithm incorporates crash values as an additional parameter alongside traditional route optimization criteria such as distance and time. By integrating safety metrics into the multi-parameter optimization process, the system identifies routes that balance travel efficiency with risk reduction, rather than simply avoiding all high-crash-value areas.
Solution Approach 2:
The system allows vehicles to traverse through grid cells with moderate crash values when the alternative routes would result in significantly longer travel times. This partial avoidance strategy, rather than complete avoidance of all risky areas, optimizes the balance between safety and efficiency by selectively avoiding only the most hazardous segments.
3Measurement precision
If comprehensive incident data is collected and analyzed, then crash value accuracy improves, but data processing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The comprehensive incident data is processed by dividing the geographic area into grid cells and calculating crash values for each cell independently. This segmentation allows parallel processing of data and simplifies the computational burden by breaking down the overall analysis into many small, manageable units that can be processed efficiently.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses historical incident data to create a representative model of road safety conditions through crash values. This copied representation of safety risks allows the system to make accurate routing decisions based on patterns in historical data without needing to analyze every individual incident in real-time, significantly reducing processing complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A vehicle safety analytics and routing system can be used to identify high risk areas and to assist in routing vehicles. The vehicle safety analytics and routing system brings together a variety of vehicle incident data that can be used in identifying high risk areas and in predicting risks for a vehicle. The routing aspect of the system uses vehicle incident data to assess the distribution of risk over a geographic area and to calculate risks associated with different potential vehicle routes. The calculated risks can be used to route vehicles around high risk intersections and stretches of road.