INCIDENT ANALYSIS TOOLKIT : EXTRACTING INFORMATION FROM INCIDENT DATABASES

Congestion due to incidents on highways throughout the United States is a growing problem. An incident is an unplanned event that reduces the capacity of a freeway. A way to address the problem of congestion caused by incidents is through incident management. Incident management refers to the series of actions by traffic and public safety officials to return a highway to its normal operating capacity after an incident has occurred. An effective incident management system seeks to have a well-coordinated incident response plan that reduces the time of delay caused by the incident. The prototype Incident Analysis Toolkit described in this paper is intended to provide techniques to analyze past incidents in order to learn about current and future incidents, and aid in devising a well-organized incident management system. For one specific test case, this toolkit is being applied to the region monitored by the Hampton Roads Smart Traffic Center in the urbanized Southeastern area of Virginia