Enhanced Decision-Making Framework Using Reliability Concepts for Freeway Facilities

This paper presents a decision-making framework based on a travel time reliability methodology developed under the U.S. Strategic Highway Research Program. Existing methods consider a set of predefined prevailing conditions for the analysis of freeway facilities as the base case. However, a reliability analysis accounts for multiple recurring and nonrecurring congestion sources to estimate the travel time distribution over a long time horizon. This approach considers variations in traffic demand levels, inclement weather conditions, and incidents that occur stochastically on a freeway facility. Several performance measures are defined based on the travel time distribution, which comprehensively cover the full range of operational conditions on the system. Based on the proposed decision-making framework, mobility strategies can be identified, evaluated, and improved.