The Traffic Police Location and Schedule Assignment Problem

Planning traffic surveillance in Spain: How to optimize the management of police resources to reduce road fatalities

Although traffic police enforcement is widely recognized as a key action in the road safety field, it can be a costly policy to implement. In addition, governments often impose budget constraints that can limit the resources available for activities such as law enforcement and surveillance. To evaluate the impact of human traffic control resources planning on traffic fatalities on Spanish NUTS-3 regions interurban roads, this paper uses an econometric model to investigate the performance of police enforcement intensity by focusing on two crucial traffic law infractions (i.e., speeding and drunk driving). After controlling for a range of economic, demographic, climate, and risk exposure variables, results highlight the relevance of visible, human, and in-person traffic law enforcement through regular vehicle patrols for reducing traffic crashes, with a non-significant effect of automatic enforcement. Our findings have important implications for traffic police resource management regarding the effective maintenance of patrol cars and plans to digitalize and automatize police administrative tasks and procedures.

Multi-Objective Human Resource Allocation Approach for Sustainable Traffic Management

Efficient human resource deployment is one of the key aspects of road traffic management for maintaining the lifelines of any metropolitan city. The problem becomes relevant when collaboration between human resources with different skills in day-to-day operations is necessary to maintain public and commercial transport, manage various social events and emergency situations, and hence reduce congestion, injuries, emissions, etc. This study proposes a two-phase fuzzy multi-objective binary programming model for optimal allocation of five different categories of human resources to minimize the overall operational cost, maximize the allocation to accident-prone road segments, minimize the number of volunteer personnel and maximize the direct contact to reduce emissions and road traffic violations, simultaneously. A binary programming model is formulated to provide an efficient individual manpower allocation schedule for multiple road segments at different shifts. A case study is proposed for model evaluation and to derive managerial implications. The proposed model can be used to draw insights into human resource allocation planning in traffic management to reduce road traffic congestion, injuries and vehicular emissions.