A Conceptual Model of Conflicts in Shared Spaces

Abstract

Shared space, an emerging alternative to conventional traffic design, encourages and requires social interaction among heterogeneous traffic participants and efficient space usage by doing away with explicit road divisions and rules. However, concerns about its efficiency and safety give rise to a need for realistic simulation models. While there is ongoing research simulating shared spaces, there is hardly any work on their safety-related analysis. This paper proposes and evaluates an important component for safety-related simulation and analysis: a model of conflicts which is maintained during shared space simulations, and which can be used both by algorithms to classify and recognize conflicts and to avoid collisions during simulation, as well as for post-simulation analysis. We present a conceptual model based on property graphs and propose an implementation based on a graph database. We verify our model through simulation analysis. Results suggest that the conflict model is instrumental both to create more realistic simulation models of shared spaces, and to conveniently obtain accurate safety-related insights in subsequent result analysis.