ESR13: Using truck sensors for road pavement performance investigation

Hey crew! I hope you all are doing well and welcome back to my blog! Today I’d like to give you feedback about my experience at Microlise Transport Conference (just Conference in the following). It is a conference about road transport organized every year by Microlise Ltd and its sponsors in order to spread knowledge about the issues and solutions that nowadays affect the industry. No, I haven't presented any article and I hadn’t any presentation there. Come on crew, there were people like Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal presenting at the Conference – and I don’t know what about you but, at least for me, it was the first time in my life I saw a member of the Royal Family in person. Actually, it was the first time for my Supervisor too. However, the Conference was really good and it was basically the opportunity for me to deeply understand the issues nowadays faced by the road transport industry. Personally, I think that the most impressive thing I got f...

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...