Exploration of Latent Themes in Truck-Mounted Attenuator (TMA) Related Accidents Using Natural Language Processing
Publication: Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
ABSTRACT
A truck-mounted attenuator (TMA) is designed to reduce the impacts of crashes and protect workers in mobile work zones. Because of the speed difference between the TMA truck (usually stationary or with very low speed) and surrounding traffic flows, the probability of TMA being crashed into is relatively high. In Indiana, 152 TMA-related accidents were recorded in crash reports between 2016 and 2021. A natural language processing approach was adopted in this study to identify the latent themes of TMA-related crashes, and the co-occurrence of themes that led to these crashes. More specifically, the proposed method started with extracting n-grams (i.e., unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams) from each TMA-related crash report. Then the correlation between each n-gram was calculated and visualized by the network topology. Next, two hypotheses to reduce the impacts of TMA-related accidents were proposed based on the network topology. The hypotheses were: (1) the implementation of autonomous TMA (ATMA) can reduce the number of injuries; and (2) trajectory planning and controlling at the merging area can reduce the number of accidents. The findings of the study include the factors leading to TMA-related crashes and the potential solutions to reduce these TMA-related crashes with the consideration of the recent development of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) and related technologies.
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Published In
Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
Pages: 218 - 225
History
Published online: Jan 25, 2024
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Accidents
- Business management
- Construction engineering
- Construction management
- Construction sites
- Engineering fundamentals
- Highway transportation
- Infrastructure
- Mathematics
- Occupational safety
- Practice and Profession
- Probability
- Public administration
- Public health and safety
- Safety
- Traffic accidents
- Traffic engineering
- Traffic flow
- Traffic management
- Traffic speed
- Transportation engineering
- Trucks
- Vehicles
- Work zones
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