IDENTIFICATION OF CRITICAL LOCATIONS FOR INCIDENT MODELLING: A CASE STUDY OF KOLKATA CITY (Paper 836)

One of the major challenges regarding development of a traffic incident management plan is the response to the incident which depends upon the location of the incident. It is necessary first to fix the locations of an incident in the micro-simulation platform for incident generation. It is quite difficult to simulate incident on each and every point in a road network as theoretically the solution space would be infinite in that case. To address this issue, a set of ‘critical’ locations is identified within the network for incident modelling. From the perspective of traffic operators, responding to incidents on the critical locations would be a challenging task. For identifying the critical locations, the factors governing the selection of critical locations are identified. Then expert opinion survey is done to assess the relevance of those factors for a pool of pre-selected locations. Then on the basis of the analysis, ranking of the locations conforming to being critical is done. This result from the expert opinion survey is then compared against the result coming from incident simulation analysis using a micro-simulation model of the study network. The final outcome includes ranking of different locations (intersections and mid-block locations) on the basis of the comparative study. From this ranking, top 20 locations (10 intersections and 10 mid-block locations) are selected as critical locations. These critical locations serve as the locations for incident simulation in the micro-simulation model developed for dynamically replicating the field scenario.