A New Method for Calculating Highway Blocking due to High Impact Weather Conditions

Abstract. Fog, rain, snow, and icing are considered to be the high-impact weather events often lead to the highway blockings, which in turn causes serious economic and human losses. At present, there is no clear calculation method for the severity of highway blocking which is related to highway load degree and economic losses. Therefore, the goal of this work is to develop a method to be used to assess the high impact weather effects on the highway blocking. Based on the K-means cluster analysis and the CRITIC (Criteria Importance through Intercriteria Correlation) weight assignment method, we analyze the highway blocking events occurred in Chinese provinces in 2020. Through cluster analysis, a new method of severity levels of highway blocking is developed to distinguish the severity into five levels. The severity levels of highway blocking due to high-impact weather are evaluated for all weather types. As a part of calculating the degree of highway blocking, a new method is proposed for China, and the highway load in each province is evaluated. The economic losses resulting from highway-blocking events caused by dense fog are specifically assessed. Results suggested that the highway losses caused by dense fog was the main contributor for highway blocking conditions and occur at about 43 %.