Real‐Time Decision‐Support System for Freeway Management and Control

Abstract

Traffic incidents are believed to cause about 60% of the congestion delay in the United States. Accordingly, a number of U.S. cities maintain Traffic Operations Centers (TOCs) for incident detection and response. However, TOC operators are currently loaded with many low-level tasks in incident management. This process could potentially be automated by an intelligent system. This paper presents such a system called freeway real-time expert-system demonstration (FRED). FRED is designed to provide decision support for TOC operators in a simulated intelligent vehicle-highway system operating environment. Based on traffic infor- mation from detectors on freeways and from an incident report database, FRED is able to detect and verify multiple incidents that occur on a freeway network, and give advice to TOC operators regarding incident response strategies. FRED is designed in such a way that new developments in the area of incident management can be easily incorporated into the existing structure.