4. Numerical Application 4.1. Data Description The studied incident dataset was obtained from the Incident Reporting AUY922 solubility and Dispatching System (IRDS) for the Beijing metropolitan area, which covers all kinds of roads. The IRDS database in the traffic control center contains all types of incidents that were reported to the control center, regardless of whether the common incident response units (i.e., traffic police) had responded to these incidents. According to previous studies [4, 27, 35], the roads where incidents occur have significant influences on traffic incident duration, presumably because of various road characteristics

and other unobserved factors. However, at present, we are unable to acquire detailed information on all of the roads in Beijing. Therefore, in this study, only the incident data for the 3rd Ring Road mainline are chosen to aid in reducing the influence of different roads on traffic incident duration time. From the IRDS database, the time of different incident duration phases can be calculated, including preparation time, travel time, clearance time, and total time, which is the sum of the first three phases. The final studied incident dataset contains 2851 incident records for a one-year period (2008), with each incident duration phase being equal to or greater than one minute. Table

1 provides the summary statistics information for the incident dataset used in this study. Table 1 Statistics information of the incident dataset. The positive skewness value, as well as the minimum, maximum, and mean values, indicates that the tail on the right of all four of these distributions is longer than that on the left side; that is, the distributions are right long tailored. The higher kurtoses of the different duration phase data mean that much of the variance is the result of infrequent extreme deviations, suggesting that infrequent extreme values are present in the dataset.

Taking travel time as an example, the longest travel time is 245min, but the second longest is only 114min. Such outliers can present difficulties both in developing estimated models and in predicting duration time. Some candidate variables related to temporal characteristics, incident and traffic condition, and so on, can be Batimastat extracted from the IRDS. This study analyzes the variables affecting traffic incident duration time to develop incident duration time prediction models, which would be helpful in incident management. Therefore, this study considered and used only specific candidate variables (shown in Table 2) that can be obtained immediately after an incident has been reported to the traffic control center. Table 2 Candidate variables. As mentioned above, traffic incident duration includes four time intervals [6].