To enhance traffic safety on mountainous roads, this study proposes an innovative CNN-LSTM-Attention model designed for the identification of near-crash events, utilizing naturalistic driving data from the challenging terrains in Yunnan, China. A combination of a threshold method complemented by manual verification is used to label and annotate near-crash events within the dataset. The importance of vehicle motion features is evaluated using the random forest algorithm, revealing that specific variables, including x-axis acceleration, y-axis acceleration, y-axis angular velocity, heading angle, and vehicle speed, are particularly crucial for identifying near-crash events. Addressing the limitations of existing models in accurately detecting near-crash scenarios, this study combines the strengths of convolutional neural networks (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, and an attention mechanism to enhance model sensitivity to crucial temporal and spatial features in naturalistic driving data. Specifically, the CNN-LSTM-Attention model leverages CNN to extract local features from the driving data, employs LSTM to track temporal dependencies among feature variables, and uses the attention mechanism to dynamically fine-tune the network weights of feature parameters. The efficacy of the proposed model is extensively evaluated against six comparative models: CNN, LSTM, Attention, CNN-LSTM, CNN-Attention, and LSTM-Attention. In comparison to the benchmark models, the CNN-LSTM-Attention model achieves superior overall accuracy at 98.8%. Moreover, it reaches a precision rate of 90.1% in detecting near-crash events, marking an improvement of 31.6%, 14.8%, 63.5%, 8%, 23.5%, and 22.6% compared to the other six comparative models, respectively.

Pavement temperature is the main factor determining road icing, and accurate and timely pavement temperature prediction is of significant importance to regional traffic safety management and preventive maintenance. The prediction of pavement temperature at the micro-scale has been a challenge to be tackled. To solve this problem, a bidirectional extended short-term memory network model based on the attention mechanism (Att-BiLSTM) was proposed to improve the prediction performance by using the time series features of pavement temperature and meteorological factors. Pavement temperature data and climatic data were collected from a road weather station in Yunnan, China. The results show that the MAE, MSE, and MAPE of the proposed Att-BiLSTM model were 0.330, 0.339, and 10.1%, respectively, which were better than the other baseline models. It was shown that 93.4% of the predicted values had an error less than 1 °C, and 82.1% had an error less than 0.5 °C, indicating that the proposed Att-BiLSTM model enables significant performance improvement. In addition, this paper quantified and analyzed the effects of parameters such as the size of the sliding window, the number of hidden layer neurons, and the optimizer on the performance of the prediction model.

Hydroplaning risk evaluation plays a pivotal role in highway safety management. It is also an important component in the intelligent transportation system (ITS) ensuring human driving safety. Water-film is the widely accepted vital factor resulting in hydroplaning and thus continuously gained researchers’ attention in recent years. This paper provides a new framework to evaluate the hydroplaning potential based on emerging 3D laser scanning technology and water-film thickness estimation. The 3D information of the road surface was captured using a vehicle-mounted Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) system and then processed by a wavelet-based filter to remove the redundant information (surrounding environment: trees, buildings, and vehicles). Then, the water film thickness on the given road surface was estimated based on a proposed numerical algorithm developed by the two-dimensional depth-averaged Shallow Water Equations (2DDA-SWE). The effect of the road surface geometry was also investigated based on several field test data in Shanghai, China, in January 2021. The results indicated that the water-film is more likely to appear on the rutting tracks and the pavement with local unevenness. Based on the estimated water-film, the hydroplaning speeds were then estimated to represent the hydroplaning risk of asphalt pavement in rainy weather. The proposed method provides new insights into the water-film estimation, which can help drivers make effective decisions to maintain safe driving.

In winter, the ice and snow on the asphalt pavement reduce the friction coefficient of the pavement, which may lead to serious traffic accidents and large-scale congestion. Taking preventive measures to ensure traffic safety by accurately predicting road surface temperature is an economical and environmentally friendly solution. However, road surface temperature (RST) prediction is a challenging task due to the complicated uncertainty and periodicity. To improve the accuracy of RST prediction, this paper aims to propose an advanced ensemble deep learning model using a gated recurrent unit (GRU) network and long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The ensemble model predicts RST by extracting the periodicity of RST and incorporating the lag and accumulation effects of meteorological factors. To verify the applicability of the ensemble model, RST data and climatic data were collected from a road weather station in Jiangsu, China. Extensive experiments are conducted including predictions for 1, 3, and 6 h ahead. The results demonstrated that the performance of the proposed ensemble deep learning model is validated for 1-, 3-, and 6-h nowcasts of RST, with mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.345, 0.833, and 1.743, respectively, and the prediction accuracy was higher than that of the baseline models [convolutional neural networks (CNN)-LSTM networks, support vector regression (SVR), and backpropagation neural network (BP) networks].