Evaluation of incident management strategies with a simulation program developed using ARENA

This paper presents an incident management simulation model for evaluating the performance of incident management strategies currently used and considered for future use. Five incident types are considered. Their severity degrees are assumed to be related with the incident characteristics, such as number of vehicles involved, number of injuries, and fatalities, etc. The relationship between severity degree and the incident properties is derived from previous data given in Ozbay et al.. The same data source is used to estimate probabilistic durations, such as incident occurrence rates, clearance times. Detection and verification time, dispatch time and clearance time can all be reduced through effective incident management strategies. The study presented in this paper focuses on the reduction of dispatch time by using various deployment strategies of ERT (Emergency Response Team). Thus, ARENA simulation development package that employs Siman simulation language is used to model and examine the effects of each incident management strategies.