Service: RWS - Machine learning for road accident predictions

Responsible organisation: Rijkswaterstraat (Central-Government)

The Netherlands Ministry of Water and Infrastructure Management (RWS) operates a 24h incident management service. Traffic managers process real-time data from 15+ screens, with chances of an accident being missed. Traffic inspectors need to ensure they are optimally positioned in their deployment zone to minimize travel time to accident sites. For this, Data Science for Social Good has been working with Rijkswaterstaat to create a machine learning model using data from incidents recorded between 2012 to 2016, road characteristics, speed and flow traffic data and weather data. The model predicts within a given time window and road segment the probability of an accident. Overlaying this on a heatmap we are able to display to traffic managers the road sections with the highest likelihood of accidents and allow them to better allocate inspectors to road sections to patrol. The solution gives a 3 to 4 times improvement on a baseline, where traffic inspectors patrol random road segments.

Additional information

Source Open Innovation Regione Lombardia
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Start/end date 2019 -
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