An Operation Condition Evaluation Method of Rural Freeways during Holidays

With the increase of freeway mileage and vehicle population, traffic volume in rural freeways is growing quickly in recent years in China. In developed areas, traffic volume in rural freeways are approaching capacity and in some cases exceed capacity, hence, lead to frequent incident and heavy traffic congestion, especially on holidays. To mitigate traffic congestion and reduce the impact of traffic incident, it's urgent to improve operation management with advanced technologies. This paper focuses on developing the real-time operation condition assessment method, which is one of the advanced operation management technologies, for rural freeways. By analyzing traffic flow and incidents data from rural freeways, the state of traffic flow and the grade of incident were determined. Then the state of operation condition was defined considering both the traffic flow and incident characteristics. The real-time operation condition assessment result will provide reference for optimizing operation management strategy, especially during high-volume period.