Infrastructure based approach for roadway departure risk assessment

This paper presents a warning device to prevent the roadway departure of light vehicles while cornering. The proposed risk assessment methodology is based on recent works from the authors (Rey et al., 2011b,a; Rey, 2010). Given the random variability arising from the driver, the vehicle and the infrastructure at the entrance to the curve, a probabilistic strategy is adopted to assess the roadway departure risk. The infrastructure-based methodology enables the real curve characteristics to be considered and an alarm triggering decision to be made. Two safety criteria are tested and the potential safety benefits of the proposed warning device are evaluated. Contrary to existing roadway departure warning systems, the proposed approach does not require extra equipment for vehicles; it only requires that the measuring and warning devices be part of the road infrastructure, which is a great advantage in terms of economic cost.