PRIME (Prediction of Congestion and Incidents In Real Time, For Intelligent Incident Management and Emergency Traffic Management') : incident management user needs.

The European Union- (EU-)project 'Prediction of Congestion and Incidents In Real Time, For Intelligent Incident Management and Emergency Traffic Management' (PRIME) builds on recent achievements in the management of incidents and road emergencies. Innovations the project aims at include methods for estimating real-time incident probabilities, improved systems for incident detection and verification, and integration of motorway and non-motorway incident management strategies. These methods will be included in the PRIME system that in this project is designed, built, implemented, tested and evaluated. The first and very important step in this project was the user needs analysis. This should ensure that the right systems are built: according to the needs of the people working in incident management. The PRIME project builds on work done in other EU-projects, such as KAREN, IN-RESPONSE and EUROSCOPE/ROMANSE. These are all projects that have something to do with incident management (IM) or traffic management (TM). The objective was to enhance the user needs defined in these earlier projects. The basic framework for deriving the user needs was taken from the guidelines produced by the CODE project. The CODE guidelines distinguish seven stages: 1. known documentation (information already available about the systems and test sites); 2. organise user needs analysis; 3. perform stakeholder analysis; 4. analysis of users in context; 5. identify user needs; 6. document and validate user needs and translate to specification; 7. consider implications for evaluation. This paper discusses the first five steps. The paper focuses on the most remarkable results from the user needs survey, as this provides the most direct insight into the preferences of emergency services and traffic managers.