Project title: Incorporating historical incident data into incident detection and performance measures at transportation management centers

Texas Transportation Institute

FHWA/TX-09/0-5485-1

Tech Report

Texas

753576394

Technical report; Sept. 2006-Aug. 2008.

Texas Transportation Institute

NTL-PLANNING AND POLICY-PLANNING AND POLICY ; NTL-SAFETY AND SECURITY-Accidents ;

The companion guidebook (0-5485-P2) developed as part of this study provides the procedures and

methodologies for effective use of historical incident data at Texas Transportation Management Centers

(TMCs). This research report documents the results from the case studies conducted using the procedures

outlined in the guidebook. Researchers examined the data collected from three Texas TMCs, which are

Houston’s TranStar, Austin’s Combined Transportation and Emergency Communications Center (CTECC),

and Fort Worth’s TransVISION. Researchers conducted six categories of analyses in this study – (a) analysis

of incident characteristics, (b) hot spot analysis, (c) incident impact estimation, (d) analysis of incident

management performance measures, (e) incident duration prediction, and (f) incident-induced congestion

clearance time prediction.

Researchers found that historical incident data can be effectively used to support incident management and

performance evaluation processes both reactively and proactively. Some procedures need to be automated to

be used efficiently in day-to-day operations. As such, various prototype tools, such as the incident duration

and incident-induced congestion clearance prediction tools, were developed during this study to facilitate and

automate the proposed methodologies. These prototype tools provided a platform for TxDOT to deploy the

research results in the future.

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Project 0-5485

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