This Function shall be capable of providing the following facilities:<br/><br/>(1) The ability to analyse the data that it receives about traffic conditions in the road network to see if can detect that possibly incidents have occurred.<br/>(2) In the analysis of the data to detect incidents, the ability to enable the use of both data provided by other functionality and video image data as inputs.<br/>(3) The ability to analyse all types of data for patterns that suggest the occurrence of an incident and the ability for such patterns to be linked to the same incident if they occur in adjacent sections of the road network.<br/>(4) The ability for the term "incident" to include anything that is likely to impede the normal flow of traffic, including such things as wide/long loads and "ghost drivers", i.e. Vehicles travelling against the proscribed direction of traffic flow.<br/>(5) The ability to send details of a detected incident occurrence to the classification and storage functionality.<br/>
(a) continuously monitor for the receipt of data flows containing traffic data from other functionality;<br/>(b) when any of the data flows in (a) are received, store the data internally and analyse it against other data already received to see if there is any abnormality in the flow of traffic using standard forms of analysis;<br/>(c) if any abnormality is found as a result of (b) check that it is not related to other abnormalities elsewhere in the road network, e.g. in an adjacent downstream road segment;<br/>(d) if related occurrences are found in (c) combine them together as part of the same incident;<br/>(e) as a result of (b) and (d) store the possible incident occurrence locally for future use in the analysis of data that is subsequently received in (b);<br/>(f) also continuously monitor the input of data about traffic flow in the presence indication data flow;<br/>(g) analyse it to determine if there is any abnormality in the flow of traffic including vehicles travelling against the proscribed flow, i.e. "ghost drivers", using standard forms of analysis;<br/>(h) if a possible incident is detected in (g) store the possible incident occurrence locally for future use in the analysis of data that is subsequently received in (f);<br/>(i) as a result of (e) and (h) send details of the detected possible incident to the Classify and Identify Incidents function in the data flow containing incident detection data.<br/>