Patrol Regimes for Traffic Officers in Transportation Asset Monitoring

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using highway traffic officers (TOs) for transportation asset management (TAM) alongside their primary role of incident response. Asset data, typically captured via highway surveys on an annual basis, are unsuitable for those assets whose condition might rapidly change, such as vegetation, streetlights, guardrails, or drainage systems. Therefore, we considered as a proof-of-concept, whether data collected from dashboard cameras installed in TO vehicles might provide analysts with near real-time asset data across an entire highway network. We considered a case study of a dedicated TO fleet deployed on the strategic road network (SRN) in England, UK, and developed a simulation based on publicly available data sets. Within the simulation, TOs patrolled under two distinct regimes and responded to dynamically generated incidents. The first regime aimed to minimize the the fleet’s incident response time, and the second aimed to maximize the fleet’s coverage, with the aim of capturing asset data across the entire highway network. Overall, our simulations showed that the TOs deployed for TAM reduced the SRN junction-to-junction section intervisit time by around 1 h 45 min, whereas their incident response time only increased by about 4 min. Moreover, 17% of SRN sections were not visited at all when the TOs prioritized fast incident response, which was reduced to 2% when the TOs prioritized the capture of asset data.