The new signalling techniques for maintenance mobile roadworks on highways

Highway maintenance operations must be performed at increasingly faster rates, under increasingly dense traffic conditions, with an increasingly reduced work force, thus rendering the safety problems even more acute and the traditional static signalling techniques even more inadequate. A new and promising principle consists in following the mobile roadwork with vehicles carrying road signs and traffic lights ("shadow vehicles") in order to cue drivers entering work zones to the lane they should use. These vehicles are commonly called "cut-in luminous arrows" in France. Despite the advantages of this technique compared to the traditional one with cones, it does not eliminate the risk of rear-end collisions for the human drivers of these "luminous arrows", this type of accident being one of the most common work zone accidents. Consequently, various projects, using automation and robotics technologies are under study in France, all of them being motivated by the same objective to move the workers away from the risky zones. For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD 882436.