Investigation of five Dutch incident detection algorithms

Abstract The Dutch national road authority Rijkswaterstaat is responsible for effective incident management. To this end Rijkswaterstaat continuously searches for detection schemes that allow the robust, timely and because of cost constraints preferably automated detection of incidents. The quality of such algorithms is measured against the dimensions of detection rate, false alarm rate and response time. For that purpose, we investigated in what way the currently available loop detector data of traffic speed and flow can be used to detect incidents. Faster and more accurate incident detection is the first step in making the process of incident management more efficient. In this paper, we present a comparison of an earlier presented Dutch algorithm with a number of different algorithms. These algorithms were specifically developed for this study, with the aim to improve the current possibilities of detecting incidents. It appears that one algorithm offers improvements over our original algorithm, and that another algorithm offers the potential of improvements.