A Time-Saving Approach to Simulation Modeling for Traffic Incident Management Program Evaluation

In this paper, a three-stage time-saving process for conducting traffic incident management (TIM) program benefit evaluation is proposed. This process relies on a developed property-based incident generation (P-BIG) procedure designed to assist in generating a set of incident scenarios that are representative of the historical incident data set and simultaneously not overly large in number so as to induce extensive computational burden. The proposed procedure was applied in evaluating the benefits of an existing TIM program for the purpose of assessing the proposed procedure’s predictive power. Results of experiments show that the procedure results in benefit estimates within 5% of the value derived employing all historical incidents, while requiring only 18% of the computational effort