Obstacle Emergence Risk and Road Patrol Policy

Abstract

The authors model the emergence processes of road obstacles, such as fallen objects on roads, the deformation and destruction of pavements, and the damage and destruction of road facilities, as counting processes. Especially, in order to take into account the heterogeneity of the emergence risk of a variety of road obstacles, the authors model a mixture Poisson process in which the arrival rate of road obstacles is subject to a probability distribution. In detail, the authors formulate a Poisson-Gamma model expressing the heterogeneity of the arrival rate as a Gamma distribution and formulate the management indicator of the emergence risk of road obstacles. Then, a methodology is developed in order to design a road patrol policy that can minimize the road obstacle risk with a limited amount of budget. Furthermore, the authors empirically verify that it is possible to design road patrol policy based on the emergence risk of actual road obstacles with the proposed methodology, by studying the cases of the application of the methodology to general national roads.