Implementation and Evaluation of Weather-Responsive Traffic Management Strategies

Abstract

information into their operations to support the operational decisions about various WRTM strategies (4). There have been active efforts in states around the country to develop and implement a wide range of advisory, control, and treatment strategies under the framework of WRTM. A comprehensive overview of WRTM practices and a collection of case studies from municipal and state transportation agencies can be found in Gopalakrishna et al. (5) and Murphy et al. (6), respectively. Also there have been efforts to integrate the weather effects into decision support tools allowing improved traffic state prediction and estimation (7,8).To reduce the impacts of inclement weather events and prevent congestion before it occurs, weather-related advisory and control measures could be determined for predicted traffic conditions consistent with the forecast weather, that is, anticipatory road weather information. A recent study identified levels of weather information integration in TMC operations and found that many TMCs viewed the desirable level of decision support strategies as using "response scenarios through software supply potential solutions with projected outcomes," while the current levels were evaluated as "ad hoc implementation of weather management strategies" (4).The goal of this study is to bridge this gap between the state of the practice and state of the art by integrating WRTM and a traffic estimation and prediction system (TrEPS). TrEPS models (9-12) are simulation-based decision support tools that provide predictive information on how traffic behaves in a given network under likely future conditions. In a previous FHWA project (7), a methodology for incorporating weather impacts in TrEPS was developed. The principal supply-side and demand-side elements affected by adverse weather were systematically identified and modeled in the TrEPS framework. The methodology was incorporated and tested in connection with the DYNASMART-P simulation-based dynamic traffic assignment system (13), providing a tool for modeling the effect of adverse weather on traffic system properties and performance and for supporting the analysis and design of traffic management strategies targeted at such conditions. The methodological development conducted to enable weather responsiveness of the simulation tools was further calibrated and validated and integrated in a real-time estimation and prediction capability (14) to support the goal of making WRTM an integral part of the traffic system management (15).On the basis of the weather-sensitive TrEPS developed in the previous studies (7,15), this paper establishes a general framework for incorporating TrEPS in actual TMC operations to support the design, implementation, and evaluation of WRTM strategies suitable The disruptive effect of inclement weather on traffic results in considerable congestion and delay, because of reduced service capacity, diminished reliability of travel, and greater risk of accident involvement. To mitigate the impacts of adverse weather on highway travel, the...

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