Real-Time Big Data Analytics and Proactive Traffic Safety Management Visualization System

Big data and data-driven analysis could be utilized for traffic management to improve road safety and the performance of transportation systems. This paper introduces a web-based proactive traffic safety management (PATM) and real-time big data visualization tool, which is based on an award-winning system that won the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) Solving for Safety Visualization Challenge and was selected as one of the USDOT Safety Data Initiative (SDI) Beta Tools. State-of-the-art research, especially for real-time crash prediction and PATM, are deployed in this study. A significant amount of real-time data is accessed by the system in order to conduct data-driven analysis, such as traffic data, weather data, and video data from closed-circuit television (CCTV) live streams. Based on the data, multiple modules have been developed, including real-time crash/secondary crash prediction, CCTV-based expedited detection, PATM recommendation, data sharing, and report generation. Both real-time data and the system outputs are visualized at the front end using interactive maps and various types of figures to represent the data distribution and efficiently reveal hidden patterns. Evaluation of the real-time crash prediction outputs is conducted based on one-month real-world crash data and the prediction results from the system. The comparison results indicate excellent prediction performance. When considering spatial-temporal tolerance, the sensitivity and false alarm rate of the prediction results [i.e., high crash potential event (HCPE)] are 0.802 and 0.252, respectively. Current and potential implementation are also discussed in this paper.