Luis Ramos, January 2015

Deteção e Caracterização Geo-Espacial das Zonas de Acumulação de Acidentes Rodoviários

Maribel Yasmina Santos (superv.), Universidade do Minho, Janeiro 2014.

Keywords: Road Traffic Accidents, Visual Analytics, Black Spots
Abstract: Nowadays, road accidents are a major public health problem, their escalation is forecasted if road safety is not treated properly, dying about 1.2 million people every year globally. In 2012, Portugal recorded 573 fatalities, on local, in road accidents, revealing the largest percentage drop of the European Union for 2011, along with Denmark, although still above average. Beyond the impact caused by fatalities, it was calculated that the economic and social cost of road accidents weighed about 1.17% of the Portuguese GDP in 2010.
In this dissertation project, in partnership with the Portuguese Road Safety Authority, the emphasis is on using Visual Analyics techniques to support exploration of spatio-temporal information of road accidents in Portugal, and so detect and characterize the geographical space accumulation zones of accidents and black spots. For this is expected to identify black spots for different parameterizations and black spots on sliding windows of 12 months, and still expected iterative analysis involving road accidents and statistics from the National Statistical Institute. Visual Analytics allows the combination of data analysis techniques with interactive visualizations, which facilitates the process of knowledge discovery in sets of large and complex data, while the Geovisual Analytics facilitates the exploration of space-time information through maps with different variables and parameters in analysis.

Currently the black spots have been restricted to annual fixed windows, but the application of Visual Analytics techniques identified in space and time, the displacement of black spots on sliding windows of 12 months, disposed in fixed annual time windows. The use of different parameterization in the identification of black spots still possible to identify locations that are close to becoming black spots. Through the created visualizations it is believed that the study and identification of countermeasures to this social and economic scourge can gain new grounds and thus the decision-making process is supported and improved.

In addition to the study of black spots, and its evolution, this work also focused on the study of traffic transfer between the motorway A23 and its alternative routes, with the introduction of tolls on former SCUTS (highways free of charge). This study resulted in the proposal of a methodology for gender issues.

Dissertation  and Presentation

Some demonstration videos (Portuguese):