New control strategies have been developed for responding to freeway incidents. Two types of incident situations were considered. In Situation 1, control is only needed at on-ramps in the immediate vicinity of the incident site. In Situation 2, control is also needed on freeway segments and connectors located upstream of the freeway segment containing the incident. The strategies were extensively tested under a wide variety of simulated incident conditions. Guidelines on strategy selection and usage in an operational environment have been prepared. Functional requirements have also been developed for an on-line incident control strategy evaluator which could pre-test the merits of several candidate strategies. This first volume presents an overview of the study highlighting the research methodology, major accomplishments, and conclusions, and recommendations for future research. The other volumes of this report are: Vol. 2 RD-80/005 Evaluation of Strategy Performance Under Simulated Incident Conditions; Vol. 3 RD-80/006 Software Documentation; Vol. 4 RD-80/007 Operational Guidelines and Requirements for an On-Line Incident Control Strategy Evaluator.
Abstract