Abstract:
Road safety is a vital element of the road’s overall function, which is
often neglected in decision-making for road maintenance management. As a result,
the safety issues, especially in rural roads, remain without funding to implement the
necessary countermeasures. One constraint faced by local authorities is the lack of
analysis tools to select appropriate safety treatmentswithin the available budget. This
study presents a methodology to logically determine the safety treatment criteria for
a selected road to increase the safety performance at project level. The decisions
regarding the safety treatments are taken based on a linear programming model
which optimizes the safety performance of the selected road. Cumulative Safety
Index (CSI) represents the safety performance of the road, which is determined based
on the prevailing issues on that road. The model comprises the objective function
by which maximizes the safety performance of the selected road concerning the
number of prevailing safety issue types. This model is used to identify the optimal
safety treatment scheme for the road chosen, ensuring prevailing safety issues of
the road are effectively addressed. The objective function consists of the Initial CSI
of the selected road and the safety improvement after treating relevant issue type
coupled with a binary decision variable. This model can also be considered an input to
road asset management systems where multi-objective optimization (MOO) models
maximize the network pavement condition and maximize overall network safety
performance.
