ESR13: Using truck sensors for road pavement performance investigation

Hi crew, I hope you are fine maybe enjoying the sun at the seaside or travelling around the world for holidays. Today my post is about the ESREL Conference 2017. In fact, a few weeks ago, me and all the other TRUSS ITN ESRs attended and presented our work at the 27 th edition of ESREL. ESREL is the European Safety and Reliability Conference (I know, the acronym does not match but this is what they claim ESREL means on the website of the conference…) organised by ESRA (the European Safety and Reliability Association) in collaboration with the University of Ljubljana. The event, hosted at the Hotel Gran Bernardin in Portoroz (Slovenia), was huge with attendees from all over the world and with different backgrounds but that all care about reducing uncertainties in assessing safety and reliability of systems with applications to a number of different fields. It was the opportunity for engineers, international experts, managers, and academics to share with each other experienc...

Hello everybody! I hope you spent nice holidays and you came back to work cheerful and full of energy! Today, as promised, I’m going to explain a bit more about the data we collect and about the type of analysis we intend to perform. As I previously explained , the objective of the project is: to assess the relationship between truck fleet fuel consumption and road pavement conditions. Data about the fuel usage are collected by Microlise Ltd whilst data about road pavement conditions are collected by TRL Ltd (but owned by Highways England ). In both cases, data are stored in very big databases which can be remotely queried whenever needed. This study is going to consider only data about trucks travelling along the English SRN (Strategic Road Network). The SRN is completely managed by the Highways England authority. It is around 7’000 kilometers long and is mostly made of motorways and ‘A’ roads. Although the SRN network represents just 2% of the length of all roa...

Hey crew! How are you doing? Are you ready for a new post? Today I will explain you why my project is so important for Europe as well as for the rest of the world. I’ll be honest with you: this time the post will be a bit more boring than usual. So, get yourself a pillow before you start reading. “Forewarned is forearmed.” cit. I will start this post with some questions for you. I hope they will allow you a better understanding of the issues that I’ll be dealing with. Have you ever remained stuck in a traffic jam? For example: while you are coming back from school or from work, or maybe when you were going to watch a football match at the stadium. Probably, you were just cursing the closest driver or all the cars around you because maybe you were missing your train or you were going to arrive late to the meeting you had with your boss. Have you ever cursed the local administration while driving on a rough road? Probably you’re so used to drive in such terr...