Development and Comparison of Planning-Level and Data-Based Evaluation Tools of Intelligent Transportation Systems

Increasingly, transportation agencies are identifying performance measurement and benefits-cost analyses of their Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) programs as high priority tasks. There is a recognition that evaluating the benefits and costs of ITS implementations are necessary for both planning and operation purposes. The evaluation of ITS as part of the transportation system planning process has been mainly performed using sketch planning tools. However, the assessment of ITS at the planning for operations and operation levels require more detailed analysis and can be based on data from different sources and/or using more detailed modeling techniques such as macroscopic and microscopic simulation models. This paper compares the abilities of a planning level ITS evaluation tool and a real-world data-based evaluation tool, both developed by the authors, to assess the impacts of incidents and incident management strategies. The results presented in this paper confirm the importance of utilizing good estimates of incident rates and durations in the benefit analysis of incident management. In addition, the results indicate the importance of using accurate estimates of traffic demands in the evaluation tools. The results also confirm the ability of the deterministic queuing analyses, when using accurate traffic and incident input parameters, to produce results that are close to real-world measurements of delays, at least for the case study used in this paper.