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 information 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.