Design and Evaluation of Operational Strategies for Deploying Emergency Response Teams: Dispatching or Patrolling
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 140, Issue 6
Abstract
Both patrolling and prepositioned strategies for allocating emergency traffic response units have been implemented in practice. To compare the performance of both response strategies, this study has conducted an efficiency comparison based on the field data from the I-495/I-95 Capital Beltway. The extensive experimental results have revealed that the effectiveness of those response strategies varies with some critical factors, including the spatial distribution of incident frequency over different times of a day, the fleet size of the response team, the congestion level, and the available detection sources. In view of the resource constraints, the study has further presented a methodology to determine the most cost-beneficial fleet size operated with the proposed strategies, considering the marginal cost and the benefit of an additional response unit on the resulting total social benefits. The analysis results with the data from the Capital Beltway could serve as the basis for highway agencies to review and optimize their incident response and management program.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Bertini, R. (2006). “You are the traffic jam: An examination of congestion measures.” 85th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC.
Chang, G.-L., and Rochon, S. (2009). “Performance evaluation and benefit analysis for CHART.” Technical Rep., Maryland State Highway Administration, Hanover, MD.
Chou, C., Miller-Hooks, E., and Promisel, I. (2010). “Benefit-cost analysis of freeway service patrol programs: Methodology and case study.” Adv. Transp. Stud. Int. J. Sec. B, 20, 81–96.
Chou, C., and Miller-Hooks, E. (2010). “Simulation-based secondary incident filtering method.” J. Transp. Eng., 746–754.
Church, R., and ReVelle, C. (1974). “The maximal covering location problem.” Pap. Reg. Sci., 32(1), 101–118.
DeCorla-Souza, P., Cohen, H., Haling, D., and Hunt, J. (1998). “Using STEAM for benefit-cost analysis of transportation alternatives.”, Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC, 63–71.
Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). (2005). “An initial assessment of freight bottlenecks on highways.” FHWA white paper, Washington, DC.
Friendly, M. (2000). Visualizing categorical data, SAS Institute, Cary, NC.
Garib, A., Radwan, A., and Al-Deek, H. (1997). “Estimating magnitude and duration of incident delays.” J. Transp. Eng., 459–466.
Geroliminis, N., Karlaftis, M. G., and Skabardonis, A. (2009). “A spatial queuing model for the emergency vehicle districting and location problem.” Transp. Res. Part B: Method., 43(7), 798–811.
Guin, A., Porter, C., Smith, B., and Holmes, C. (2007). “Benefits analysis for incident management program integrated with intelligent transportation systems operations-case study.” J. Transp. Res. Board, 2000(1), 78–87.
Haghani, A., Iliescu, D., Hamedi, M., and Yang, S. (2006). “Methodology for quantifying the cost effectiveness of freeway service patrols programs—Case study: H.E.L.P. program.” Technical Rep., Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD.
Hakimi, S. (1964). “Optimal locations of switching centers and the absolute centers and medians of a graph.” Oper. Res., 12(3), 450–459.
Hall, R. (2002). “Incident dispatching, clearance, and delay.” Transp. Res. Part A, 36(1), 1–16.
Kweon, Y., and Kockelman, K. (2003). “Overall injury risk to different drivers: Combining exposure, frequency, and severity models.” Accid. Anal. Prev., 35(4), 441–450.
Larson, R., and Odoni, A. (1981). Urban operations research, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Latoski, S., Pal, R., and Sinha, K. (1998). “An evaluation of the cost effectiveness of the Hoosier helper program and framework for the design of ITS optimal system configuration, phase 1.”, Joint Transportation Research Program, Indiana Dept. of Transportation and Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, Indiana.
Lindley, J. (1989). “The urban freeway congestion problem.”, Transportation Research Board (TRB), National Research Council, Washington, DC.
Lord, D., and Mannering, F. (2010). “The statistical analysis of crash-frequency data: A review and assessment of methodological alternatives.” Transp. Res. Part A: Pol. Pract., 44(5), 291–305.
Lord, D., Washington, S., and Ivan, J. (2005). “Poisson, Poisson-gamma and zero-inflated regression models of motor vehicle crashes: Balancing statistical fit and theory.” Accid. Anal. Prev., 37(1), 35–46.
Lou, Y., Yin, Y., and Lawphongpanich, S. (2010). “Freeway service patrol deployment planning for incident management and congestion mitigation.” Transp. Res. Part C Emerg. Technol., 19(2), 283–295.
Ma, J., Kockelman, K., and Damien, P. (2008). “A multivariate Poisson-lognormal regression model for prediction of crash counts by severity, using Bayesian methods.” Accid. Anal. Prev., 40(3), 964–975.
Maccubbin, R., et al. (2008). “Intelligent transportation systems benefits, costs, deployment, and lessons learned: 2008 update.”, Noblis, Washington, DC.
Nam, D., and Mannering, F. (2000). “An exploratory hazard-based analysis of highway incident duration.” Transp. Res. Part A, 34A(2), 85–102.
Ozbay, K., and Bartin, B. (2003). “Incident management simulation.” Simulation, 79(2), 69–82.
Pal, R., and Bose, I. (2009). “An optimization based approach for deployment of roadway incident response vehicles with reliability constraints.” Eur. J. Oper. Res., 198(2), 452–463.
Pal, R., and Sinha, K. (1997). “A framework for locating highway incident response vehicles in urban areas.” INFORMS National Meeting, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Catonsville, MD.
Pal, R., and Sinha, K. C. (2002). “Simulation model for evaluating and improving effectiveness of freeway service patrol programs.” J. Transp. Eng., 355–365.
Schrank, D., Lomax, T., and Eisele, B. (2011). “Urban mobility report 2011.” Texas Transportation Institute, College Station, TX.
Sherali, H. D., and Subramanian, S. (1999). “Opportunity cost-based models for traffic incident response problems.” J. Transp. Eng., 176–185.
Skabardonis, A., Petty, K., Bertini, R., Varaiya, P., Noeimi, H., and Rydzewski, D. (1997). “I-880 field experiment: Analysis of incident data.” J. Transp. Res. Board, 1603(1), 72–79.
Skabardonis, A., Petty, K., Varaiya, P., and Bertini, R. (1998). “Evaluation of the freeway service patrol (FSP) in Los Angeles.”, Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA.
Smith, K., and Smith, B. (2001). “Forecasting the clearance time of freeway accidents.”, Center for Transportation Studies, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
Transportation Research Board (TRB). (1994). “Highway capacity manual: Special report 209.” National Research Council, Washington, DC.
Zhang, H., and Khattak, A. (2010). “What is the role of multiple secondary incidents in traffic operations?” J. Transp. Eng., 986–997.
Zhu, S., Kim, W., and Chang, G.-L. (2012). “Design and benefit-cost analysis of deploying freeway incident response units: A case study for Capital Beltway in Maryland.” J. Transp. Res. Record, 2278, 104–114.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 140 • Issue 6 • June 2014
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 20, 2012
Accepted: Feb 4, 2014
Published online: Mar 31, 2014
Published in print: Jun 1, 2014
Discussion open until: Aug 31, 2014
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.