Research on Road Traffic System Safety Evaluation Based on Catastrophe Control Model

Road traffic system is an organic coupling system which is composed of four sub-systems, driver, vehicle, road and environment. Evaluating the safety of road traffic system is beneficial to identify the system risk and make more pointed safety measures. Although most existing evaluation models had been set up basing on classical geometry theory, which mainly use the evaluation index such as the vehicle operation information and traffic accidents data etc.. The evaluation result is difficult to reflect the relative safety among sub-systems and whole system directly. In order to overcome the problems above, this paper adopts the catastrophe theory and establishes the corresponding evaluation model of road traffic system based on catastrophe theory, in which the cusp catastrophe model, swallowtail catastrophe model and butterfly catastrophe model are available. Finally, the practicality and accuracy of model were verified through examples. The case study shows that the evaluation result is consistent with the actual situations, which indicates that it is scientific and reasonable to applying the analytical method to the safety evaluation of road traffic system.