Modeling Analysis of Incident and Roadway Clearance Time

Abstract

Three Traffic Incident Management (TIM) Performance Measures were defined in the recent research project “Federal Highway Administration Focus States Initiative (2009): Traffic Incident Management Performance Measures”, including incident clearance time, roadway clearance time, and the number of secondary crashes. Theoretically, the ending time of roadway clearance time is a function of incident clearance time and other traffic and roadway characteristics. This research explored the relationship between incident clearance time and roadway clearance time using micro-simulation VISSIM modelling to run different traffic incident scenarios. Approximately 50 traffic incident scenarios were developed to generate the data for different types of incidents under traffic conditions. Number of through lanes, number of blocked lanes, and traffic volumes were some of the variables being considered. Then, a mathematic model was developed to demonstrate the relationship between roadway clearance time and incident clearance time.