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. 2023 Dec 13;18(12):e0295343.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0295343. eCollection 2023.

Point-process modeling of secondary crashes

Samarth Motagi  1 , Sirish Namilae  1 , Audrey Gbaguidi  1 , Scott Parr  2 , Dahai Liu  3
Affiliations

Point-process modeling of secondary crashes

Samarth Motagi et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Secondary crashes or crashes that occur in the wake of a preceding or primary crash are among the most critical incidents occurring on highways, due to the exceptional danger they present to the first responders and victims of the primary crash. In this work, we developed a self-exciting temporal point process to analyze crash events data and classify it into primary and secondary crashes. Our model uses a self-exciting function to describe secondary crashes while primary crashes are modeled using a background rate function. We fit the model to crash incidents data from the Florida Department of Transportation, on Interstate-4 (I-4) highway for the years 2015-2017, to determine the model parameters. These are used to estimate the probability that a given crash is secondary crash and to find queue times. To represent the periodically varying traffic levels and crash incidents, we model the background rate, as a stationary function, a sinusoidal non-stationary function, and a piecewise non-stationary function. We show that the sinusoidal non-stationary background rate fits the traffic data better and replicates the daily and weekly peaks in crash events due to traffic rush hours. Secondary crashes are found to account for up to 15.09% of traffic incidents, depending on the city on the I-4 Highway.

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Conflict of interest statement

There are no competing interests for this study.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Histograms showing the distribution of crashes according to (a) time and (b) day of the week.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Primary and secondary crashes classified from the model for Tampa, Orlando and Daytona Beach along the I-4 highway.
Secondary crashes are shown in red.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Queue time for Orlando region during different time of the day.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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