Incidents, including accidents, vehicle breakdowns, spills, and/or other random events, reduce the capacity of the road and cause congestion when traffic demand exceeds the reduced capacity at the incident location. Effective management is needed for mitigating the negative effects of incidents on congested roads and freeways.
Existing incident management systems generally encompass modules including incident detection algorithms, incident impact prediction, and incident-responsive traffic management and control. Incident duration prediction is a component of the latter two modules. Incident duration prediction refers to the ability to anticipate essential incident characteristics such as duration, and allows traffic managers to make improved decisions on how to use management and control resources.
An incident includes the following phases: (a) incident detection and reporting time, (b) response time, (c) clearance time, and (d) recovery time. Incident duration is typically defined as the sum of first three phases; that is, it is the duration between the instances of incident occurrence and of departure of the response vehicles from the accident scene.
In general, the impact of an incident in terms of both magnitude and extent of congestion is significantly affected by incident duration. Because duration is unknown until the incident is cleared, an accurate means of estimating incident duration is needed for real-time prediction of incident impacts, deriving effective response management and control strategies, etc.