The response plan elements and best practices identified by project stakeholders—the alternate routes to be considered, the actions to be taken, the components to be activated, the personnel to be involved—are captured as rules to be used by the Decision Support System in generating response plans. These rules, developed by the project team, take the form of: “If an event occurs at location X, do Y and notify Z.”
The rules will be processed by a rules engine, which will evaluate many rules and determine the best response plans. The rules engine must support a complex set of conditions to account for the complexity of incidents, considering factors such as time of day, day of the week, expected duration, location of the incident, and possible issues with alternate routes such as an active school zone. A response plan can also be scaled depending on the severity and length of the incident. For example, if two lanes of the freeway are expected to be closed for one hour, that would warrant a different response plan than if the two lanes were expected to be closed for ten hours or if the closure were to occur at 3am versus 3pm.
The ICM System Architecture and Design section of the website has more information on the DSS and other system components.