Effects of drivers evasive behavior on the placement of automated enforcement equipment in highway systems

Abstract

The placement of automated enforcement equipment on highways is a problem of interest for many roadway infrastructure entities and law enforcement agencies. It is common that in such cases the vehicles actively try to evade enforcement, because this allows them to continue to earn profit with illegal transportation and avoid the punishment of the law. If this is not considered in the planning stages of enforcement systems, drivers can easily avoid the enforcement with the aid of route planning software. This paper seeks to investigate how such behavior changes where the enforcement equipment should be located on highway networks, by firstly reviewing how this problem has been solved in literature and then experimenting with one of the main mathematical models. The results showed that accounting for evasive behavior when locating enforcement equipment does not significantly increase the number of monitored sections that are necessary but rather optimizes their location in order to cover all the possible paths between all source-destination pairs (within a defined maximum detour from the shortest path). If planning is done without considering evasive behavior and vehicles do show this behavior, then the system may be ineffective for enforcement. On the other hand, if this tendency to avoid enforcement is considered in planning, which is greater than that shown by real vehicles, then all vehicles will be successfully captured by enforcement, without resulting in an excessive increase in cost.

Keywords

• Transportation systems. Enforcement. Location. Evasion. Flow capture.