Methodologies for evaluating the impact on safety of intelligent vehicle highway systems

The Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS) programme includes a wide variety of types of systems, all of which are intended to improve some aspect of highway travel. As these systems evolve, it is important to know if they are accomplishing their design goals; and it is also important to ensure that they are not introducing unwanted degradation of other aspects of travel. Safety is one of those aspects which should not be degraded; and if possible, should be improved. All operational tests which are supported by the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) include safety as an element of the evaluation. The impact on safety of systems which are already being deployed is also studied. This paper addresses the goals, methodologies, and preliminary results from safety evaluations, and presents a summary of studies which are underway. Systems which are discussed include the TravTek route guidance and navigation demonstration, collision avoidance systems, and the TravelAid in-vehicle hazard warning demonstration. (A) For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD 894848.