The introduction of autonomous vehicles in the surface transportation system could improve traffic safety and reduce traffic congestion and negative environmental effects. Although the continuous evolution in computing, sensing, and communication technologies can improve the performance of autonomous vehicles, the new combination of autonomous automotive and electronic communication technologies will present new challenges, such as interaction with other nonautonomous vehicles, which must be addressed before implementation. The objective of this study was to identify the risks associated with the failure of an autonomous vehicle in mixed traffic streams. To identify the risks, the autonomous vehicle system was first disassembled into vehicular components and transportation infrastructure components, and then a fault tree model was developed for each system. The failure probabilities of each component were estimated by reviewing the published literature and publicly available data sources. This analysis resulted in a failure probability of about 14% resulting from a sequential failure of the autonomous vehicular components alone in the vehicle’s lifetime, particularly the components responsible for automation. After the failure probability of autonomous vehicle components was combined with the failure probability of transportation infrastructure components, an overall failure probability related to vehicular or infrastructure components was found: 158 per 1 million mi of travel. The most critical combination of events that could lead to failure of autonomous vehicles, known as minimal cut-sets, was also identified. Finally, the results of fault tree analysis were compared with real-world data available from the California Department of Motor Vehicles autonomous vehicle testing records.

No-notice evacuations of metropolitan areas can place significant demands on transportation infrastructure. Connected vehicle (CV) technology, with real-time vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communications, can help emergency managers to develop efficient and cost-effective traffic management plans for such events. The objectives of this research were to evaluate the impacts of CVs on no-notice evacuations using a case study of a downtown metropolitan area. The microsimulation software VISSIM was used to model the roadway network and the evacuation traffic. The model was built, calibrated, and validated for studying the performance of traffic during the evacuation. The researchers evaluated system performance with different CV penetration rates (from 0 to 30 percent CVs) and measured average speed, average delays, and total delays. The findings suggest significant reductions in total delays when CVs reached a penetration rate of 30 percent, albeit increases in delays during the beginning of the evacuation. Additionally, the benefits could be greater for evacuations that last longer and with higher proportions of CVs in the vehicle stream.

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The efficient movement of users and goods is the primary purpose of the surface transportation system. Roadway traffic crashes have devastating impacts on quality of life of the users as well as health of the system. While researchers are utilizing advanced computing and communication tools to reduce number of crashes on the roadways, there is still an absence of appropriate method to evaluate the safety performances of these advanced technologies in the planning stage. Development of crash modification factors (CMFs) is a standard method to evaluate the safety effect of proposed countermeasures. Though, the current practices of developing CMFs are not efficient and cost-effective in case of addressing impacts of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) countermeasures. This study demonstrated a proof of concept of simulation-based framework for determining CMFs for ITS countermeasures. The proposed framework includes the application of traffic microsimulation model and Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM) developed by Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The integration of these two models is suggested to estimate CMFs efficiently. However, the calibration of traffic microsimulation model and SSAM model is essential to portrait the real-world scenarios. A case study for estimating CMFs of ITS countermeasures was conducted to validate the proposed simulation-based approach. Four ITS countermeasures were considered: ramp metering, variable speed limit, junction control, and dynamic lane assignment. They were coded in traffic microsimulation environment and vehicle trajectory files were generated to import into SSAM model. After analyzing these trajectory files in SSAM tool, it was found that all proposed ITS countermeasures, except variable speed limit assignment, could reduce the number of crashes at crash prone locations.