Transformer-based modeling of abnormal driving events for freeway crash risk evaluation

A crash risk evaluation model aims to estimate crash occurrence possibility by establishing the relationships between traffic flow status and crash occurrence. Based upon which, Proactive Traffic Safety Management (PTSM) systems have been developed and implemented. The current crash risk evaluation models relied on high dense traffic detectors, which limited the applications of PTSM to infrastructures with enough sensing devices. To address such application limitation issue, this study employed the widespread abnormal driving event information that is generated by emerging driving monitoring and vehicle connection techniques to develop the crash risk evaluation model. Specifically, to characterize abnormal driving events, a six-tuple embedding method was proposed to store their space, time and kinetics features. Given their irregular and discrete distributions on roadways, a Transformer model with self-attention mechanism was proposed to extract the spatial distribution characteristics. In addition, a time-decay function was integrated to fit the temporal impacts of abnormal driving events on crash risk. Empirical data from a freeway in China were utilized for the analyses. The results showed that abnormal driving events with lower speed, larger acceleration and duration are more likely to cause crashes. The accumulation of multiple events in the time period of less than 3 min would lead to a sharp increase of crash risk. Besides, compared to the average metrics of the widely adopted Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), XGBoost, and logistic regression models, the proposed model achieved higher accuracy (0.841) and AUC (0.777), with average improvement of 2.5 % and 9.1 % respectively.