Risk Assessment for Operational Safety of Autonomous Truck Mounted Attenuator (ATMA)

2022 - Ongoing

The AMT pool fund program has recently funded a tabletop analysis of different types of crash scenarios and the subsequent actions by different stakeholders. However, ATMA deployment risks are more than the ones during and after the crash. It is also critical to understand the potential major operational safety risks of ATMA deployment, before the crashes occur, and it is equally or even more important to identify countermeasures to prevent those crashes from happening. Identified and quantified risks and their impacts can further guide DOTs to prioritize these risks and work with DOT engineers to deploy corresponding countermeasures to ensure safety during ATMA deployment and generate additional product requirements.

The objective of the study is to identify safety risks associated with ATMA operations and the activities (i.e. policies, procedures, and strategies, as well as new technology functional requirements) for DOTs to mitigate such risks. Special attention is given to those activities which are particularly important for maintaining safe operation of ATMA. Further, the project seeks to identify risk mitigation strategies and best practices that can be borrowed from other automated driving system community (e.g., automated passenger vehicle, automated commercial vehicles/CMV).

The outcome of the project can be directly adopted by CDOT and other DOTs to identify risks of ATMA deployment and develop corresponding strategies. This is a necessary step that accelerates the future widespread deployment ATMA technologies for work zone safety. The benefit can be measured by directly calculating the avoided safety risks after adopting the results of this study. The long-term benefit can be measured by the accelerated deployment of ATMA to improve work zone safety and traffic efficiency.

People

Dr. Jiaqi Ma
Dr. Xianbio Hu (Pennsylvania State University)
Maynard J. Factor (Kratos Defense)