AutoCAR — A decision support tool for freeway traffic controllers

An important part of road traffic operations is the ability to locate and resolve congestion-causing traffic incidents as quickly as possible. The provision of appropriate decision support tools which help maintain this form of situation awareness is therefore mandated. This paper describes the overall architecture and design of one such tool. AutoCAR (Automated Congestion Analysis & Report) is an object-oriented, rule-based expert system which incorporates some concepts from catastrophe theory to help differentiate between demand-based and incident-based traffic congestion.