Improving Safety Service Patrol Performance

About the project:

The objective of this research is to develop a methodology and a tool for optimizing VDOT safety service patrol (SSP) routes, schedules, staging, and personnel needed to serve a given corridor. The methodology will incorporate various decision variables and parameters to accommodate the complexities in real-world deployments. A proof of concept will be developed for an existing corridor to demonstrate the applicability and use of the methodology. More specifically, the proposed research will achieve the following objectives:

• Review and document the current state of the practice in other states and their implementation of SSP optimization procedures.
• Identify and specify the functional requirements for the SSP optimization tool in terms of its objectives, decision variables, constraints, and model outputs.
• Develop an optimization framework that accounts for all factors identified and a computationally efficient method to perform the optimization process.
• Create a user-friendly optimization tool for VDOT staff to execute the SSP deployment optimization methods and determine the most feasible solutions to a given scenario.
• Validate and test the tool by conducting sample analyses for selected corridors under various operating conditions.
• Document the steps required to execute the tool in a reference manual for VDOT users, and train VDOT staff on how to use the optimization tool to solve a specific problem and how to perform sensitivity analysis.

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