Performance evaluation of struck-by-accident alert systems for road work zone safety

Road work zones pose significant safety risks to both vehicles passing by and the construction workers moving within the work zones. Over recent years, significant research efforts have been dedicated to work zone safety, particularly by leveraging emerging technologies. This paper aims to review the literature on performance evaluation of safety technologies designed to mitigate struck-by hazards. This review identified 57 relevant publications focusing on technology evaluation, which were critically reviewed using the Four-component Cyber-Physical System (CPS) hierarchy and the Adapted Layer of Protection Analysis (ALOPA) framework. The CPS hierarchy-based review unveiled the focused components under evaluation, the relationship among these components, the methodologies employed, and the key performance results. The extent and completeness of the evaluation methods were examined through the ALOPA framework. The findings of this research highlight emerging trends that explore the impact of human factors on accident avoidance outcomes in risk-free virtual environments and suggest several prospective considerations as per ALOPA that can guide future research towards performance-based evaluations and design optimisations. • A CPS hierarchy is used to characterise the struck-by-accident alert systems. • The ALOPA framework is used to examine the extent and completeness of evaluation. • An adapted evaluation tool provides a roadmap for performance-based evaluation. • The roadmap suggests the research gaps and future research directions.