Overview
This report presents the performance evaluation study of the Coordinated Highways Action Response Team (CHART) for the Year 2015, including its operational efficiency and resulting benefits. The research team at the Civil Engineering Department of the University of Maryland, College Park (UM), has conducted the annual CHART performance analysis over the past seventeen years for the Maryland State Highway Administration (MSHA).
Similar to previous studies, the focus of this task was to evaluate the effectiveness of CHART’s ability to detect and manage incidents on major freeways and highways. Assessing the benefits resulting from incident management was equally essential. In addition, this annual report has extended the analysis of incident duration distributions on major highways for better understanding of the incident characteristics and management.
The study consisted of two phases. Phase 1 focused on defining objectives, identifying the available data, and developing the methodology. The core of the second phase involved assessing the efficiency of the incident management program and estimating the resulting benefits using the 2015 CHART incident operations data. As some information essential for efficiency and benefit assessment was not available in the CHART-II database, this study presents only those evaluation results that can be directly computed from the incident management data or derived with statistical methods