Contraflow on major evacuation routes is one scheme that has been adopted in many Gulf and eastern coastal states for hurricane\r\nevacuation. The idea is to reverse one direction of the roadway in order to accommodate the often substantially increased travel\r\ndemand moving away from the impact area. Efficient planning and operation is critical to a successful contraflow implementation.\r\nAlabama has an approximately 140-mile contraflow segment on I-65 between exit 31 and exit 167 and has carried out contraflow\r\noperations several times in past hurricane evacuations.Thetiming for the deployment of equipment and personnel and the initiation\r\nand termination of actual contraflow affects the effectiveness, safety, and cost of the operation. Researchers from the University of\r\nAlabama were tasked with the design of a decision support system for contraflow evacuation planning. The conceived decision\r\nsupport system consists of three main modules: the demand module, the network optimization module, and the incident and\r\ncharacterization module. This paper focuses on the design of the traffic incident generation and characterization module of the\r\nplanned decision support system.
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