Overview
The aim of the Scoring Traffic at Roadworks (STARs) project is to enable National Road Administrations maintenance contracting authorities across Europe to set appropriate and effective contractual limits for the impacts of road maintenance and construction works on traffic, and to enable consistent benchmarking of roadworks safety across Europe.
Differing traffic management practices, born of differing approaches to addressing safety, result in variation across the European Union. In order to understand these national differences this study aims to generate a common method and standard to assess contractor performance
The main elements of the study are:
- To use existing and new evidence and experience to construct three comparable outcome-based scoring scales for performance at roadworks. The scales will reflect road worker safety, road user safety and traffic performance.
- To calibrate the three scales to account for international variability using scheme specific data from across Europe with a focus on roadworks on the Trans-European Road Network.
- To develop a single, unified metric based on the premise that the three scales are interdependent, as shown in the above triangle figure. This scale will be developed from unbiased rating of sample schemes and the performance of various nations and will highlight specific traffic management techniques that score highly across the three scales.
- To produce a practical tool for use by procurement officers and contracting authorities in setting contractor targets
The proposed method for this study uses a mixture of information collection and theoretical models. By drawing upon the strengths of six EU research institutions the project will be able to deliver a practical evidence-led scoring method.
Funding
Results
The aim of the STARs project was to develop a methodology to score road works schemes on three interdependent aspects which are normally considered in isolation: road user safety, road worker safety and network performance. This will encourage national road authorities and their suppliers to take a holistic approach to managing safety risk and network performance and facilitate more comprehensive ranking of alternative management strategies.
To achieve this objective, the STARs evaluation tool has been developed. This tool is intended for use by road works contracting authorities in setting performance targets for road works schemes, contractors in achieving these performance targets and road authorities in planning and assessing proposed road work schemes. It can be used to assess real, proposed or hypothetical road works schemes in terms of the safety of road workers and road users and the network performance, but also to assess the impact of varying management strategies in order to minimise the risk in all three areas at the same time. Alternative strategies are ranked to identify the optimal solution.
The tool consists of three ‘modules’:
- The first module is the user input module where the user describes the project, i.e. the road work scheme to be evaluated. This includes specifying the parameters to be varied in order to assess different management strategies.
- The second module is the core of the evaluation tool. Each combination of parameters selected by the user is scored according to each of the three risk equations, which have been designed to assess the performance of the alternatives pertaining to the three risk areas.
- The third module solves the multicriteria problem in order to rank the alternatives and identify the optimal solution in terms of all three risk areas as well as calculating a combined score.