John Steenbruggen

Effectiveness of Net-Centric Support Tools for Traffic Incident Management

In the last two decades traffic Incident Management (IM) has become an important tool to reduce and prevent congestion on the road network, especially in urban areas. IM involves the coordinated interactions of many public and private actors. To support their tasks in an effective way, information systems are becoming increasingly important. In particular, information and system quality and Situational Awareness (SA) have been identified as major hurdles for effective emergency response. This paper reports the results of an empirical analysis of the effectiveness of net-centric information systems to improve the cooperation between public and private IM organizations. A set of controlled experiments were conducted with 16 participants. Data on the responses of the participants were collected through questionnaires and observer notes. The analysis focused on: a comparison of the tools tested, in terms of the appreciation of information and system quality, a comparison of the communication and coordination of a test group and a control group of emergency workers; the value of SA in the performance of the decision-making process; and, how scenario complexity can affect the design principles of net-centric systems.

Integration of Traffic Information into the Path Planning among Moving Obstacles

This paper investigates the integration of traffic information (TI) into the routing in the presence of moving obstacles. When traffic accidents occur, the incidents could generate different kinds of hazards (e.g., toxic plumes), which make certain parts of the road network inaccessible. On the other hand, the first responders, who are responsible for management of the traffic incidents, need to be fast and safely guided to the incident place. To support navigation in the traffic network affected by moving obstacles, in this paper, we provide a spatio-temporal data model to structure the information of traffic conditions that is essential for the routing, and present an extended path planning algorithm, named MOAAstar–TI (Moving Obstacle Avoiding A* using Traffic Information), to generate routes avoiding the obstacles. A speed adjustment factor is introduced in the developed routing algorithm, allowing integration of both the information of vehicles and traffic situations to generate routes avoiding the moving obstacles caused by the incidents. We applied our system to a set of navigation scenarios. The application results show the potentials of our system in future application in real life.

Traffic incident and disaster management in the Netherlands. Challenges and obstacles in information sharing

Disaster Management and Traffic Incident Management involves the coordinated interactions of many public and private actors. On many levels, there is clearly a strong relation between the road infrastructure and the effective handling of large scale disasters. To support these tasks in an effective way, netcentric information systems are increasingly being seen as an important constraint to improve the cooperation between different emergency services. However, in the field of information systems there are many challenges and obstacles. Information, communication and coordination tasks, and especially problems in information quality, are identified as the main hurdles. This paper addresses, from a broad perspective, the relation and challenges between the two related fields.