Multi-Criteria Analysis for Evaluating the Impacts of Intelligent Speed Adaptation

Road safety is a policy priority due to the high casualties and costs associated with traffic accidents. Since speed is a major cause of these accidents, in-vehicle speed limiters or Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA), seems a promising solution. ISA implementation, however, is hindered by large uncertainties, for example about the impacts of ISA, the way users might respond to ISA, and the relationship between speed and accidents. Traditional Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) has limitations in handling these uncertainties. This paper presents an MCA approach based on exploratory modeling, which uses computational experiments to explore the multiple outcomes of ISA policies (safety, emissions, throughput, and cost) across a range of future demand scenarios, functional relationships for performance criteria, and user responses to ISA. As an illustration, by testing the impacts of different ISA penetration levels on 2 driver groups, it is shown that when compliance with ISA is expected to be low, a policy aimed only at novice drivers outperforms other ISA policies on safety improvement.