Freeway Incident Management System Application in Jiangsu, China

Abstract

Incident management has already become an integral part of freeway traffic operations. Most of the departments of transportation have some kind of an operational incident management plan. However, no practical incident management systems have ever been developed in China, which is discordant with the rapid development of Chinese freeway and national economy. Therefore, in order to fill this gap, we develop a freeway incident management system, which is specially applied in the northern section of Nanjing-Lianyungang Freeway, combined with the status quo of China and our field study there. In this paper, detailed introductions of this system are illustrated, which help to provide a broad picture of the overall incident management process along with a quick review of this system for real-time operations. Among the five major aspects of this system, we first classify the freeway incidents according to the actual conditions of our country; next, we establish an expert system based on rules, which could generate preplans automatically. Then, we focus on the emergency treatment of incidents related to hazardous material (HAZMAT) on the basis of GIS. Subsequently, real-time management of these incidents with preplans has been carried out along with the log been recorded. Finally, information of traffic divergent and warning is disseminated accordingly. This incident management system is simple to use and has been successfully applied in the northern section of Nanjing-Lianyungang freeway for more than one year, and acclaimed a useful decision-making tool by its users.