Researcher Profile

Field: Innovative road infrastructure safety strategies

Main Research: Road Safety and Intelligent Transport Systems

Experience: I am a researcher and project manager at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), with more than 8 years of work experience in research design and planning in the fields of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and road safety. In my current PhD study at the Loughborough University in the UK, I work on collision scenarios and testing procedures for driver-less cars. During my master’s studies, I developed a system to evaluate road pavement condition using in-vehicle sensors and artificial neural networks. I am very proud that a patent was granted for my method. My work at the Austrian Road Safety Board helped me to gain expertise as a researcher in the fields of traffic safety and road accidents analyses. Since 2008, I have been working at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), where I am responsible for numerous national and international research projects. In the AIT Mobility Department, I helped to establish “Mobile Sensing” as a key competence for a broad spectrum of topics in mobility research. My further expertise comprises vehicle dynamics and vehicle-road interaction as basis for future cooperative traffic services and driver assistance.

• July 2014 - March2015: ERTRAC Task Force "Connectivity and Automated Driving"
• November 2013 - December 2015: iMobility Working Group "Probe Data"

• Verkehrssicherheitsanalyse von Tunnels auf Autobahnen und Schnellstraßen
  Author(s): Nussbaumer, C., Nitsche, P.
  Journal: Straßenverkehrstechnik , 11 (2009) ; 722-727
• A simulation-based concept for assessing the effectiveness of forgiving roadside treatments
  Author(s): Nitsche, P., Stütz, R., Helfert
  Journal: Advances in Transportation Studies, Special Issue 2011 (2011) ; 87-98
• Comparison of Machine Learning Methods for Evaluating Pavement Roughness Based on Vehicle Response
  Author(s): Nitsche, P., Stütz, R., Kammer, M., Maurer, P.
  Journal: Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 28 (2014) ; 1-8
• Supporting large-scale travel surveys with smartphones – A practical approach
  Author(s): Nitsche, P., Widhalm, P., Breuss, S., Brändle, N., Maurer, P.
  Journal: Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Special Issue with Selected Papers from Transport Research Arena 43, Part 2 (2014) ; 212-221

• Requirements on Tomorrow‘s Road Infrastructure for Highly Automated Driving
  Author(s): Nitsche, P., Mocanu, I., Reinthaler, M.
  Conference The 3rd International Conference on Connected Vehicles & Expo (ICCVE 2014), Vienna, Austria
• The impacts of electric cars on road safety: Insights from a real-world driving study
  Author(s): Nitsche, P., Aleksa, M., Winkelbauer, M., Harnisch, M., Kammer, M.
• A simulation framework for assessing the safety effects of soft and hard shoulders as examples of forgiving roadside treatments
  Author(s): Nitsche, P., Stütz, R., Saleh, P., Maurer, P.
  Conference Transport Research Arena 2012, Athens, Greece
• Monitoring ride quality on roads with existing sensors in passenger cars
  Author(s): Nitsche, P., Van Geem, C., Stütz, R., Mocanu, I., Sjögren, L.
• Costs and benefits of cooperative ITS for road authorities: the COBRA decision-support tool
  Author(s): Ball, S.D., van Noort, M., Nitsche, P.

• Publications AIT publications database