Improving incident response in the Netherlands

Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) is a division of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment and, among other things, ensures road safety in the Netherlands. They do this by operating a 24-hour service called Incident Management. Traffic management centers dispatch road inspectors to incident sites to secure them and restore normal conditions as quickly as possible to ensure optimal traffic flow.

There are approximately 260 road inspectors and 160 traffic managers in the Netherlands that handle 85,000 – 120,000 incidents on the highways each year. RWS plans the location of inspectors based on history, experience and capacity such that inspectors are as close as possible to the likely incident sites.

DSSG will help RWS by developing a policy for optimizing stationary and patrolling locations of inspectors on duty to minimize the time it takes them to reach an incident site. The goal is to optimize safety and traffic flow for road users. The model could also be relevant to other similar emergency response operations.