A study of characteristics of motorway vehicle breakdown duration

This paper presents an analysis of vehicle breakdown duration on motorways. The distribution of breakdown duration was shown to be statistically significantly different for three categories of vehicle type and were shown to conform to a Weibull distribution. A predictive vehicle breakdown duration model was developed, based on fuzzy logic. The variables used in this model were: vehicle type, breakdown time, breakdown location and reporting mechanism. The performance of the model was tested with encouraging results. Clustering of data was shown to be due to rounding errors when the operator reported an incident duration of 60 and 120 minutes. The unexplained variation in the model was due to the limitations in the specification of the model parameters. This was because the incident data set available was incomplete. This paper highlights the need for standardisation in the recording of data used in incident management