Modeling the evolution of incident impact in urban road networks by leveraging the spatiotemporal propagation of shockwaves

Traffic incidents bring disruptions to the smooth movement of vehicles and have a spillover effect on the traffic in urban road networks. Although there has been a large number of studies that attempt to estimate spatiotemporal impact of traffic incidents, most, if not all, of them focus on the incident that occurs on a stretch of freeway. In contrast to the freeway where road sections follow the order of a straight line, the complex topological structure of road networks poses challenges for estimating the impact region of the incident. In this research, we develop an integer programming model with a set of novel constraints to formulate the spatiotemporal evolution of incident impact in urban road networks. The interdependence of incident impact on adjacent links is characterized by leveraging the propagation of shockwaves. Finally, we conduct numerical experiments using simulation data to validate our model and present the potential application of our model in real world. Results demonstrate that our model is able to achieve satisfactory performance in capturing the spatiotemporal evolution of incident impact and quantifying the incident-induced delay. © 2024 Elsevier Ltd