Quantification of Mn/DOT Motor Carrier Safety Program Impacts

Project summary:

We shall develop methods (and their software implementations) for quantitative evaluation of the Motor Carrier Safety Programs impacts on accident reduction, based on available historical data. Several adaptive statistical and neural network methods for nonlinear data analysis will be applied to the historical data (for Minnesota motor carriers) in order to estimate the effectiveness of various carrier safety programs. The (anticipated) results of this project will: (1) quantify the relationship between accident reduction (or the reduction in out-of-service ratios) and various MCSAP program initiatives; (2) identify the most important factors/variables contributing to accident reduction.