• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.17-30
• /
• 2002

Incident duration prediction is one of the most important steps of the overall incident management process. An accurate and reliable estimate of the incident duration can be the main difference between an effective incident management operation and an unacceptable one since, without the knowledge of such time durations, traffic impact can not be estimated or calculated. This research presents several multiple linear regression models for incident duration prediction using data consisting of 384 incident cases. The main source of various incident cases was the Traffic Incident Reports filled out by the Motorist Assistant Units of the Korea Highway Corporation. The models were proposed separately according to the time of day(daytime vs. nighttime) and the fatality/injury incurred (fatality/injury vs. property damage only). Two models using an integrated dataset, one with an intercept and the other without it, were also calibrated and proposed for the generality of model application. Some findings are as follows ; ?Variables such as vehicle turnover, load spills, the number of heavy vehicles involved and the number of blocked lanes were found to significantly affect incident duration times. ?Models, however, tend to overestimate the duration times when a dummy variable, load spill, is used. It was simply because several of load spill incidents had excessively long clearance times. The precision was improved when load spills were further categorized into "small spills" and "large spills" based on the size of vehicles involved. ?Variables such as the number of vehicles involved and the number of blocked lanes found not significant when a regression model was calibrated with an intercept. whereas excluding the intercept from the model structure signifies those variables in a statistical sense.