Assessment of risks of infrastructure and development of risk models

The enlargement of the EU and the entry of candidate countries from Eastern Europe will result in strong changes in the pan-European regional planning. Through its position in the centre of Europe Austria must cope with more and more traffic. Traffic safety and increasing standards of traffic safety are of great concern to Austrians. This is reflected by the Austrian traffic safety program 2002-2010 and also on the European level with the 6th supporting program. The development and application of intelligent integrated and prognostic safety systems based on information and communication technologies are to be accelerated.

For this purpose models for the evaluation of the risk potential of traffic infrastructure (project MARVin) are being developed. Road-related values are very important for all traffic telematic applications. The increasing traffic and the resulting need of precise traffic stream analyses and the necessary measures for traffic routing are the basis for the development of a system which can be used in a mobile and cost efficient fashion in order to answer those questions.

The project MARVin engages in the relation of traffic condition and accidents and includes the analysis of the road condition, location and event of the accident. Selective and historic analyses can be conducted thus linking present accident and road condition data. In case of an accident street geometric /road condition can be coordinated with the help of geometric design. MARVin is an inter-divisional project which uses RoadSTAR data and makes them applicable for a variety of purposes (RONCALLI market square, road maintenance, road planning, DG TREN).

The data recording and analysis is at the core of traffic stream analyses. The objective of arsenal research is the precise data collection and analysis. In the future we aim to deliver the basics for questions of traffic planning and coordination, as well as traffic telematic.