A Hybrid PSO-Fuzzy Model for Determining the Category of 85th Speed

The 85th speed of vehicles is one of the traffic engineering parameters used by road safety equipment designers. It is usually used for maintenance activities and designing of warning signs and road equipments. High measuring costs of speed data collection lead decision makers to define a methodology for determining the category of 85th speed using indirect parameters. In this research work, focusing on undivided intercity roads, a hybrid particle-swarm-optimization- (PSO-) fuzzy model has been developed to determine the category of 85th speed. In this model, geometric design parameters including roads' width and length characteristics and roadside land use are considered as input variables whereas the category of the 85th speed is output variable. A set of experimental data is used for evaluating the performance of the proposed model comparing to a well-known model of exponential regression. It is shown that the developed PSO-fuzzy model is capable of determining the category of 85th speed with an accuracy of 96%, while exponential regression can estimate that with up to 84% accuracy. Variable effectiveness procedure shows that the lane width has more direct effect on 85th speed than shoulder width and the number of access points. The percentage of forbidden overtaking is also found to have indirect effect on 85th speed.