Optimized Deployment Strategy for Roadside Units Based on Accident Risk Assessment and Simulation Validation

Intersections are crucial and high-risk areas in urban road networks due to dense traffic and complex scenarios. Deploying Roadside Units (RSUs) can enhance safety and efficiency by providing real-time traffic information. However, the impact of traffic accident risks on RSU deployment is largely ignored. This study introduces an innovative RSU deployment strategy that prioritizes the risk of traffic accidents at intersections. The approach begins with analyzing environmental conditions, traffic patterns, and historical accident data at target intersections to identify key risk dimensions: road, accident, and environmental. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Entropy Weight Method (EWM) are used to weigh the indicators to evaluate their importance in accident risk assessment. Then, construct an objective function based on the accident risk value of the intersection. To overcome the redundancy problem in risk assessment, this study proposes an improved 0-1 knapsack algorithm that considers the redundancy of intersection accident risk to determine the optimal deployment location of RSUs. Simulations with SUMO, TraCI, Veins, and OMNeT++ demonstrate the algorithm’s superiority over traditional methods in all metrics. The results show that the vehicle coverage of this strategy is on average 2.63% and 2.86% higher than that of the IIA-ORD and UDA algorithms, respectively. It also leads by about 5.04% in traffic accident coverage and 5.72% in accident risk coverage. This intersection-focused RSU deployment method ensures timely information dissemination after incidents, providing valuable insights and practical guidelines for improving urban intersection safety and efficiency.