Reliability-Based Risk Analysis of Roadway Horizontal Curves
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 138, Issue 8
Abstract
Reliability-based analysis of road geometric design has been reported in literatures as a trend in transportation safety study. In the reliability analysis of a horizontal curve, the performance function is usually formulated as a function of the failure mode of vehicle skidding only. This paper takes into account the failure modes of vehicle skidding and rollover in formulating the performance functions of cars and trucks, respectively. A comparative study of three different performance functions for calculating the probability of vehicle failure modes is conducted. The results qualitatively show that trucks are more vulnerable to skid than cars, and are more likely to rollover than to skid on dry pavement. A vehicle's is greatly influenced by vehicle suspension and roll motion. A sensitivity analysis investigating the influences of vehicle parameters and superelevation on vehicle skidding and rollover follows. In order to make the paper practically useful, the probability of failure for the minimum radius recommended by AASHTO at various superelevations and design speeds was computed to investigate the reliability of the recommended minimum radius.
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Acknowledgments
This research is sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant CMMI-0408390 and NSF CAREER Award CMMI-0644552, by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 51050110143 and U1134206, by the Huoyingdong Educational Foundation under Grant No. 114024, by the Jiangsu Natural Science Foundation under Grant No. SBK200910046, and by the Jiangsu Postdoctoral Foundation under Grant No. 0901005C, for which the authors are very grateful.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 138 • Issue 8 • August 2012
Pages: 1071 - 1081
Copyright
© 2012. American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 24, 2010
Accepted: Dec 29, 2011
Published online: Feb 7, 2012
Published in print: Aug 1, 2012
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