Noise Constrained Design Optimization of Road Edge Tactile Warnings via Coupled Tire and Road Acoustic Modeling

Abstract

Roadway departure crashes remain a persistent contributor to severe injuries and fatalities, motivating infrastructure-based countermeasures that can operate independently of driver compliance. Shoulder profiling features that induce tactile and auditory cues are widely deployed because they can alert inattentive drivers with minimal operational cost. However, these features also radiate sound to the environment, creating an externality that becomes salient in residential corridors and in contexts with strict noise expectations. This paper develops a technical framework for designing road-edge profile geometries that preserve alerting efficacy while explicitly constraining community noise. The core contribution is a coupled tire--road contact and acoustic radiation model that maps profile geometry to both in-vehicle and far-field sound metrics through physically interpretable intermediate states, including contact force spectra, structural filtering, and radiation efficiency. We cast geometry selection as a robust multi-objective optimization problem under uncertainty in vehicle speed, tire type, suspension transfer characteristics, pavement temperature, and installation tolerances. The proposed formulation introduces a safety-relevant alerting constraint based on interior spectral energy in frequency bands associated with driver perception, and a community-impact constraint based on weighted exterior radiated power subject to propagation variability. We derive tractable surrogate structures enabling gradient-informed search over manufacturable profile parameterizations while enforcing smoothness and durability constraints. A validation protocol is described that emphasizes field-reproducible measurement harmonization between interior and exterior metrics. The resulting approach provides a principled pathway for agencies to tune tactile warning infrastructure to local noise sensitivity without sacrificing safety function.