Incident-Induced Congestion and Truck Diversion Strategies Evaluation: State-of-the-Art and Future Challenges

Increased urbanization, population growth, and economic development within the United States have led to an increased demand for freight travel to meet the needs of individuals and businesses. Consequently, freight transportation has grown significantly over time and has expanded beyond the capacity of the infrastructure systems, which has caused increased challenges in many regions. Trucks are the principal mode of freight transportation and are expected to increase in both value and tonnage. Traffic congestion has impacted the trucking industry and has caused a significant loss of productivity, which costs around 63 billion dollars annually. In order to maintain quality of life and enhance public safety, there is a growing need to dedicate more effort to investigating and planning traffic management, and to assessing the impact of trucks on the highway systems. Traffic diversion strategies can be implemented to mitigate the congested facilities by diverting traffic to potential alternate routes. Therefore, truck diversion decisions should be carefully managed in order to improve the safety and efficiency of the overall network system. The majority of previous studies focused on enhancing the traffic operation of passenger vehicles, rather than that of trucks. Additionally, the consideration of alternate route selection criteria has been limited. There is, therefore, a lack in the attention that has been paid to evaluating and assessing the impact of truck diversion on the performance of the selected routes. This paper presents a review of the incident-induced congestion problem and traffic diversion strategies in recent years. Furthermore, it identifies future challenges and concludes with recommendations for the future application of such strategies.