Achieving smarter work zones is one of the initiatives promoted by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in the U.S. that uses innovative strategies to improve work-zone safety and mobility. Many intelligent transportation systems (ITS) tools and applications have been developed and implemented to effectively mitigate traffic impacts caused by construction. In an attempt to reduce risky behaviour around work zones, this project examines the effectiveness of using in-vehicle messages to raise drivers’ awareness of safety-critical and pertinent work-zone information. The objective of this project is to investigate Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) tags that can be deployed in or ahead of work zones to provide in-vehicle warning messages. The BLE tags will trigger spoken and contextual messages in existing smartphones located in vehicles passing by the tag. The goal of this task is to develop a smartphone app to detect BLE tags in the environment and announce an audible message through the text-to-speech (TTS) interface on the phone. Drivers often rely on signs along the roadway to be cautious and slow down as they approach the upcoming work zone. However, most work-zone crashes are caused by drivers not paying attention. Our approach aims to design and test an in-vehicle work-zone alert system that announces additional messages through the driver’s smartphone. These messages would be triggered by passing near specific BLE tags in or ahead of the work zone and adjacent to the road. Our goal is to understand whether this type of additional warning message tailored to the individual driver’s behaviour can improve the situation awareness of drivers and their response to the work zone, particularly when there are workers on site and construction work is in progress. This investigation centers around an inexpensive technology based on BLE tags that can be deployed in or ahead of the work zone. A smartphone app was developed to trigger non-distracting, auditory-visual messages in a smartphone mounted in a vehicle within range of the BLE work-zone tags. Messages associated with BLE tags around the work zone can be updated remotely in real time and as such may provide significantly improved situational awareness about dynamic conditions at work zones such as: awareness of workers on site, changing traffic conditions, or hazards in the environment. Experiment results indicate that while travelling at 70 mph (113 km/h), our smartphone app (called Work-zone Alert) is able to successfully detect a long-range BLE tag placed over 410 feet (125 meters) away on a traffic barrel on a roadway shoulder. Several experiments were conducted to validate the system performance under different roadway geometry, traffic, and weather conditions. The current system demonstrated that it is capable of providing in-vehicle messages for motorists approaching a work zone using a geo-fencing technique and the Bluetooth low-energy technology. Our experimental results indicated that communication between a smartphone and BLE tags at highway speed is feasible. In a subsequent phase of the study, we plan to: (1) incorporate the recommendations of in-vehicle message structure and content from a human factors study conducted by the HumanFirst Lab, and (2) conduct a pilot implementation with multiple participants to evaluate the effectiveness of using our system by providing in-vehicle work-zone messages to drivers. (Author/publisher)
Abstract