M2S1 – Measuring the on-board weighting of heavy vehicles

Author

László Ketskeméty

Mini Project ID

BMEMPLOAD2

Description

The case: Illegal overweighting of heavy goods vehicles is a major problem throughout Europe. Heavy goods vehicles, buses and coaches transporting goods in Europe must comply with certain rules on weights and dimensions for road safety reasons, and to avoid damage to roads, bridges and tunnels.

The EU Committee on the Determination of the Weighting in Motion of Heavy Vehicles reviews the task and, as a first step, defines the data needed for the solution. The long-term goal of this project is to not only control and sanction the weight of heavy vehicles – which is a prominent goal as well – but also to monitor the long European road network, forecast deterioration, plan maintenance / renovation, and allocating of the central resources ideally. A data matrix is to be constructed where the cases are the connecting sections of the international road network and the variables are the quality indicators of the road sections. Among these, one of the most important indicators is the weight load caused by heavy vehicles crossing the road. This data can be updated daily using the WIM (Weighting In-motion) or the OBW (On Board Weighting) systems.

In each country, an up-to-date database is already kept on the status of the country’s road sections, which is regularly updated. From these regional databases, a single BIG DATA database should be created, covering the sections of the international road network. The data must be updated at a minimum monthly density and must be regularly downloaded from the Member States’ databases.

Sector

VET

Data

These are some of the data that is already being collected by the regional roadside inspectorates: Weight load of heavy vehicles passing per day, vehicle traffic passing per minute, degree of groove of the road surface, degree of track trough, number of potholes. This data is provided by a laser measuring car constantly cruising the roads. The data is updated on a monthly basis and stored on a central computer per country.

Model

With the Big Data technique, a single European data matrix is to be designed, in which – in addition to data describing the conditions of road sections – weight load data are also included. The weight data will flow in online way from the measuring network to be set up.

Calculation

Considering the principle of GIGO (Garbage Input-Garbage Output), the database must be regularly filtered and maintained. Missing data should be replaced by interpolation techniques (e.g. multidimensional linear regression).

Solution...