Abstract

In the past few years, traffic incident management has been a subject of interest in both politics and research. After an incident has occurred, incident management measures are intended to clear the motorway for traffic, inform other road users and treat victims as soon as possible. These measures largely constitute formal agreements, procedures and coordination efforts between all parties involved. Although the new incident management measures currently in effect in the Netherlands have improved the time required to clear an incident scene, information technology is expected to decrease the required time even further by improving communication and situational awareness and supporting analysis and evaluation of the incident response.
In this scope, a new IT system is developed, called the Incident Management Information and Communication System (IMICS). Based on an existing framework, the Java Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE), IMICS offers a blackboard like functionality through which the police, fire brigade, ambulance, traffic control centres, the shared control rooms and the Department of Public Works can update and share incident and task information both at the control rooms and at the incident scene.
In order to provide clear and unambiguous information, an ontology and an information management system have been designed that closely follow the incident management procedures.
Finally, a part of the IMICS design has been implemented and tested in a lab setting as a proof of concept. The results show IMICS improves availability and reliability of data in a lab setting.