The development and application of an incident management system for the Northern section of Ninglian expressway

Abstract

Paper presented at the 26th Annual Southern African Transport Conference 9 - 12 July 2007 "The challenges of implementing policy?", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa. ABSTRACT: The Nanjing-Lianyungang Expressway, which is referred to in this paper as the NingLian Expressway, was opened to traffic in 1999 and operated normally without an incident management system until March 2006. To improve the safety and emergency service of the northern section of the Expressway, an incident management system was developed and applied. Three major parts of the system, namely the demand analysis, system design, and system application, are described in this paper. For the demand analysis, the management method for the northern section of the NingLian Expressway, which can be regarded as representative of the management of most of the expressways in Jiangsu Province and even the whole country, was first investigated. Next, the detailed state of affairs and the relationships between the interrelated agencies involved in incident management were analysed and the resource distribution of each agency was determined. Finally, a demand analysis of an incident management system, that is most suitable for Chinese expressways, was completed. The principal functions of the system design are as follows: confirmation of the incident classification, real-time incident information display based on an integrated GIS map and automatic generation of an incident plan by the rules-based expert system, control of the incident management process, real-time incident information dissemination via mobile phone short message service and Internet sites and automatic generation of management report forms. The system has been formally in use since April 2006 at the management centre of the northern section of NingLian Expressway. According to the statistical analysis, by September 2006, the decision-making correctness rate of the expert system was above 85% and the mean rescue time was reduced by 30%.