| Summary |
The non-recurrent delay caused by the incident accounts for around 13% to 30% of the total freeway delay. Hence, shortening the time spent on incident response and improving response efficiency are critical for reducing the delay of the freeway. This study proposes a dynamic dispatch model of emergency response teams for freeway incidents based on the multi-depot vehicle routing
problem and the online operation procedure of the proposed model. The major objective is to minimize the total incident response time while taking into account of the stochasticity of potential incident occurrence and constructs a tabu search algorithm as the solution method for the mathematical model. The results of the case study indicate that the proposed model can shorten the
solution time to less than 40 seconds and improve the efficiency of the incident response. Especially in the scenario where the frequency of incident occurrence is relatively high, the improvement can reach 14% to 42%. In addition, compared with the situation that does not consider the stochasticity of incident, the proposed model provides additional 3.79% improvement in terms of total response time when considering the stochasticity. However, over-emphasis on the stochasticity may lead to an increase in the total response time because of relatively conservative strategies. |
