Hortatory operations in highway traffic management

This article examines two aspects of traffic management for highway networks. First, we introduce the term hortatory operations to describe highway traffic management as a type of human-machine system in which human operators have limited ability to directly control activities in the system. Instead, they must rely heavily on distributing messages of advice and encouragement as a means to achieve smooth traffic behavior. We discuss some of the features of this type of system. Second, we portray traffic management as a process that integrates both quantitative and qualitative information. We then describe the development and testing of a decision-aiding software tool that combines the two types of information. The tool supports traffic management by helping operators differentiate between demand-based and incident-based congestion. The decision aid´s performance was investigated using real traffic data. The results of statistical analysis showed that the integrated process had superior performance compared to the “traditional” quantitative analysis running alone