Work Zone Safety: Behavioral Analysis with Integration of VR and Hardware in the Loop

According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), work zone fatalities at road construction projects account for up to 3% of all workplace fatalities in a given year. A study of work zone crash data in five states showed that around half of the crashes occur within or adjacent to work activities, putting workers in serious danger. One of the main proactive approaches adopted by construction companies to prevent these incidents is safety training courses, which are designed to help increase awareness of hazards around the job sites. However, work zone safety knowledge from training courses is not enough to change the level of vigilance of workers, which is easily affected by factors such as fatigue or environmental distractions.

Thus, there is a need for an VR integrated hardware in the loop (HIL)-based simulation platform that can be used to study workers’ interactions with roadside units as well as connected vehicles, and their responses to notifications with the purpose of reducing incidents involving workers on urban street and on highways. This enables development and testing of different warning strategies on a physical real-world hardware deployment, thus, helping us analyze the constraints and delays associated with the warnings and messages exchanged with such physical hardware. This project aims to understand the key parameters that play a role in achieving responsive behaviors in workers.  Through wearable sensors and representations of traffic loads from real data acquired from hardware in the loop systems and work zones in virtual reality, data on workers’ behavioral and physiological responses to warnings issued under various realistic scenarios and varying warning mechanisms will be studied.