A Scenario-based Model for Fleet Allocation of Freeway Service Patrols

Abstract

As one component of traffic incident management systems, freeway service patrols (FSP) facilitate quick removal of incidents through faster response and reduced clearance time. This paper is to investigate how to strategically allocate tow trucks among patrol beats to optimize the performance of the FSP system. A mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is formulated to minimize the expected loss with respect to a set of high-consequence scenarios of incident occurrence, which may be solved in polynomial time for realistic networks. Moreover, the data required for the model can be easily obtained from practice.