Optimization Model for Locating Service Stations along the Freeway

The high economic cost and social impact associated with freeway incidents has prompted Traffic Management Agencies world-wide to develop incident management system (IMS) aiming to alleviate incident consequences. In order to reduce the response time and clear the incidents quickly and safely, an efficient and effective deployment of incident response resources, especially the service stations, is critical to IMS. The objective of this paper is to develop a tool to search for optimal locations of service stations along the freeway, to minimize the response time from the service stations to the incident sites. A dynamic programming approach is presented in this paper, followed by a case study to demonstrate the application of this optimization model in accordance with the status quo of China. With 20% reduction in total travel time, the model shows good potential in improving the incident response time.