United States Department of Transportation
i
Low-cost, distributed, sensor-based weigh-in-motion systems.
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2009-12-01
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[PDF-1.80 MB]
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Alternative Title:Low-cost, distributed sensor-based WIM systems
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Edition:Final research report.
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Abstract:Monitoring truck weights is essential for traffic operations, roadway design, traffic safety, and regulations.
Traditional roadside static truck weighing stations have many operational shortcomings, and so there have
been ongoing efforts to develop and implement Weigh-In-Motion (WIM) systems to make vehicle weight
monitoring and enforcement more automatic, unobtrusive, and cost-effective. Current WIM systems
typically rely on a transverse, instrumented beam installed in the roadway itself, which then can act as a
transducer system whose response can be related to vehicle weights via calibration and basic principles.
These systems work reasonably well, but they are still relatively costly to install and maintain since they
require nontrivial modification of the roadway itself, and there are limitations on where and when they can
be installed. The work aims to investigate an approach to WIM systems that can greatly reduce costs
and increase flexibility and reliability by using the fact that the unmodified roadway pavement/foundation
subsystem itself can be viewed as a transducer system amenable to direct characterization and calibration.
Rather than using a relatively expensive, obtrusive single sensor system, the proposed approach would use
a large number of inexpensive, self-powered, unobtrusive wireless sensor devices that would work
together at a given location to achieve reasonably accurate vehicle weight measurement without modifying
the roadway itself. The fundamental technologies and theoretical building blocks underlying the proposed
approach all exist, but research is needed to answer a number of technical and practical questions to enable
the development of a deployable system. To this end, we propose the development of both virtual and
physical prototype systems that we will use to investigate the feasibility, suitability, accuracy, and
generality of the proposed technology as a future heavy vehicle weight monitoring system.
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