PROBE BASED INCIDENT DETECTION USING DIFFERENTIAL OF BOTTLENECK CAPACITY

Abstract

Traffic incidents cause heavy traffic congestion resulting in severe delays. Early and precise incident detection contributes early provision of information and incident handling to mitigate negative impacts of traffic incidents. Automatic incident detection algorithm has been introduced as freeway incident management system to detect incidents more early and precisely. Several conventional studies developed incident detection algorithms using observation data from roadside traffic detectors. However, it is difficult to install traffic detectors in the entire road networks because of their costs of installation and maintenance.
This study developed incident detection algorithm using information obtained from probe vehicles. By using the probe vehicle data, incident detection can be available in inter-urban freeways and developing countries' freeways where few traffic detectors are installed. The proposed algorithm is designed by checking the spatial difference of each probe vehicle's travel time and the temporal changes of the rate of flow at downstream of bottleneck. As a result of validation in microscopic traffic simulator, the algorithm has a certain accuracy.