Customization of Automatic Incident Detection Algorithms for Signalized Urban Arterials

Non-recurrent congestion or incidents are detrimental to the operability and efficiency of busy urban transport networks. There exist multiple automatic incident detection algorithms (AIDAs) to remotely detect the occurrence of an incident in highway or freeway scenarios; however, very little research has been performed to automatically detect incidents in signalized urban arterials. This limited research attention has mostly been focused on developing new urban arterial specific algorithms, rather than identifying alternative methods to synthesize existing freeway-based algorithms for urban conditions. The main hindrance to such synthesis is that the traffic patterns on the signalized urban arterials are significantly different from the same on highways/freeways due to the presence of traffic intersections. This article introduces a new strategy of customizing the existing AIDAs (freeway based or otherwise) to significantly improve their adaptability to signalized urban arterial transport networks. The new strategy focuses on preprocessing the traffic information before being used as input to a freeway/highway-based AIDA to lessen the effect of traffic signals and to imitate the input patterns in highway/freeway-based incident conditions. The effectiveness of this new strategy has been established with the help of four existing AIDAs. The proposed strategy is a simple solution to implement existing algorithms to signalized urban networks without any further instrumentation or operational cost.