Identifier

etd-04102017-105100

Degree

Master of Science in Civil Engineering (MSCE)

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The studies conducted in this thesis evaluate the safety benefits of a blind spot warning (BSW) application and a do not pass warning (DNPW) application at low, medium, and high market penetrations (MP) of connected vehicles (CV) using a high-fidelity driving simulator. Using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, CVs can exchange information to alert drivers of potential safety hazards and reduce potential crashes during lane change and overtaking maneuvers. A CV testbed was developed to relay visual and auditory warnings when dangerous thresholds were met for each application. For the BSW a proximity-based threshold was used to trigger a warning as a CV approached the simulator vehicle’s blind spot. To test the impact of MP on the effectiveness of the BSW Application, four simulation scenarios were developed with zero, 25%, 50%, and 75% MP rates. Drivers were instructed to perform lane change maneuvers whenever they felt comfortable. For each lane change, the simulator vehicle and blind spot vehicle’s speeds and gaps were collected. Two non-parametric tests, along with a post-hoc pairwise test, were used to compare the significance each MP had on the minimum time-to-collision (TTC) and the variance of the speed of the subject vehicle and blind spot vehicle. A similar study was performed to test the DNPW application. For this pilot study, a TTC threshold was designed to warn drivers of oncoming vehicles on a two-lane two-way rural roadway. Participants performed five overtaking maneuvers within each experiment, totaling to 30 maneuvers for each MP. The safety of each maneuver was evaluated by the TTC between the simulator and oncoming vehicle at the beginning and end of the maneuver, the time spent in the opposing lane, the headway between the simulator vehicle and the vehicle in the right lane before the maneuver, and the tailway between the two vehicles following the maneuver. The results of both studies indicated that a medium MP (50%) is required to achieve significant safety improvement from CV safety applications.

Date

2017

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Ishak, Sherif

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.4604

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