This study assessed the feasibility of deploying mobile safety-sign robots to replace human flaggers in highway work zones and determined the optimal Dynamic Message Display (DMD) configurations. The study consisted of two phases. The first phase involved a pilot test on a test road in Yeoju, where the work zone conditions were replicated by following the highway work zone traffic management guidelines. Eight drivers participated in a pilot test. All four driving behavior indicators demonstrated improvements in driving safety under the robotbased scenario compared with the conventional human flagger scenario. The second phase adopted a Virtual Reality (VR)-integrated Driving Simulator (DS) to analyze the driver behavior across various DMD types. Six robot-based scenarios were designed by combining three DMD message types with two display sizes along with one baseline scenario based on existing guidelines for comparison. Twenty drivers participated in this experiment. A rank-based comparative analysis incorporating five evaluation indicators was performed to derive the optimal DMD display type. Scenario 3 (vertical ‘60’ display) and Scenario 6 (horizontal ‘감속60’ display, ‘Reduce speed to 60’ in English) were identified as the optimal DMD display types. These findings establish a foundation for the development of traffic management standards for safety sign robots in highway work zones.

In this study, project information of government-funded research institute in the food field was collected and analyzed to systematically identify the factors affecting the process of transferring technological achievements of public research institute to the private sector. This study hypothesized that human resources, financial resources, and technological characteristics as input factors of R&D projects affect output factors, such as research papers or patents produced by R&D projects. Moreover, these outputs would serve as drivers of the technology transfer as one of the R&D outcomes. Linear Regression Analysis and Poisson Regression Analysis were conducted to empirically and sequentially investigate the relationship between input factors and output and outcome of R&D projects and the results are as follows: First, the principle investigator's career and participating researcher's size as human resource factors have an influence on both the number of SCI (science citation index) papers and patent registration. Second, the research duration and research expenses for the current year have an influence on the number of SCI papers and patent registrations, which are the main outputs of R&D projects. Third, the technology life cycle affects the number of SCI papers and patent registrations. Lastly, the higher the number of SCI papers and patent registrations, the more it affected the number of technology transfers and the amount of technology transfer contract.