Incident Management Simulation

Abstract

A simulation model is developed to evaluate the performance of incident management operations. The Washington, D.C. beltway network is used as the study highway due to the availability of real-world incident data. Five incident types are considered. Their severity degrees are assumed to be related to the incident characteristics, and a relationship between the severity degree and the allocation of necessary emergency units is derived from previous data in related studies. Three different periods can be minimized during an incident removal process: detection and verification time, response time, and clearance time. This study focuses on the variation of detection and response times for various deployment strategies of emergency response teams. The Arena simulation package is used to model and examine the effects of various incident management strategies. An example scenario is given, and possible strategies are compared based on the statistical values obtained from the simulation output analysis.