How should we prioritise incident management deployment?

With perpetual strains on resources and traffic increasing at a steady rate, transport agencies need to evaluate the road network and make informed decisions to determine which roads have the greatest risk of adverse impacts and therefore identify the roads that have the greatest case for intervention. This is especially the case for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and in particular incident management services where decision-making techniques are immature relative to conventional road engineering. This problem is compounded by the fact that common evaluation tools are insufficient for ITS applications. Historical information for ITS impacts is not always readily available, impacts are not transferable and impacts are incremental to the individual user. For these reasons, a new network evaluation framework is presented in this paper for incident management deployment. The framework aims to analyse the road network and prioritise roads with respect to two factors: the historical risk associated with incidents; and the cost effectiveness of implementation. To assess the historical risk, the framework initially converts social, economic and environmental impacts to a common monetary base, enabling the addition of the incident impacts. The economic impact values must be treated as relative values of measurement, not absolute costs. The second part of the framework assesses the historical risk, taking into account both the consequence of an event, measured in economic terms described above, and the probability of an event occurring based on historical information. The third uses a cost-effective ratio comparing the reduced impacts with the project costs. The economic risk analysis presented in Figure 1 below integrates safety, reliability and environmental impacts, providing an integrated decision-making tool for proactive ITS deployment decision-making.