Award Date

5-1-2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Civil Engineering (MSCE)

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

First Committee Member

Alexander Paz

Second Committee Member

Mohamed Kaseko

Third Committee Member

Hualiang Teng

Fourth Committee Member

Pramen P. Shrestha

Fifth Committee Member

Brendan Morris

Number of Pages

68

Abstract

The AASHTOWare software, Safety Analyst, is a state-of-the-art tool with significant capabilities and advanced analytical methods for comprehensive analysis and management of highway safety. However, currently, this tool provides very limited visualization capabilities. To address this limitation, this study proposes a Visualization System for Safety Analyst that provides graphical displays, including location and color-coded information for each module. In addition, the system generates charts, which have various degrees of resolution and aggregation; tables; and a report summarizing safety performance measures. The system can use Google Maps and/or ESRI ArcGIS to generate the graphical displays. The advantage of using Google Maps is its simplicity; in contrast, the ArcGIS display provides additional modeling and computing capabilities. All the displays are very intuitive, and can be customized based on the user needs. Because the user can see the locations of every specific site, the displays facilitate analysis as well as the decision-making process. The Visualization System interacts with Safety Analyst so that the user can access all tools and data throughout the entire modeling and analysis process. A tutorial and a survey questionnaire were used to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the Visualization System. The results suggest that the participants were very satisfied with the overall concept and performance of the Visualization System. In general, they prefer to use Safety Analyst in conjunction to the Visualization System.

Keywords

Information visualization; Software visualization; Traffic accidents; Traffic safety; Visual analytics

Disciplines

Civil Engineering

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Download


Share

COinS