Naturally, the service life of a component essentially depends on the strongly varying loads occurring during operation. Therefore, load data statistics and durability design targets are especially important for the determination of operational strength. Only if a statistical description about the distribution of the loads occurring during operation is available, a sound statement concerning durability can be made.

Methods of load statistics in combination with methods of system identification allow for the determination of correlations between load distributions and various influence parameters, which is a very important condition for the availability of a reproducible rating basis where distances and customer, location, or vehicle influences are accounted for.

The ITWM has specialized in the conception and application of especially tailored data reduction and analysis methods in order to develop design target loads or to shorten the duration of experiments and simulation times. Methods applied here are, for example, non-parametric distribution descriptions and approaches from extreme value statistics.