VMC® Use Case: Road Roughness Investigation in Brazil at Daimler

In a close collaboration of Daimler Trucks and our institute, VMC®-related methods have been applied within the durability investigations at Daimler.

One goal of the collaboration was to apply an approach for identifying road profiles and road roughness indicators (IRIs) based on easy-to-acquire vehicle measurements (vertical accelerations of the axle or the frame or spring displacements). Approximately 5000 km from a measurement campaign in Brazil with a heavy duty tractor have been processed exemplarily.

Our Approach: Considering Dynamics and Road Profiles

The approach includes a partial vehicle model (quarter-car in the simplest case), which reflects the relevant vertical dynamics, and back-calculates road profiles by Bayesian inversion of that model. The model must be parametrized consistently to the measurement vehicle. The approach automatically incorporates noise and inaccuracies and delivers vehicle-independent roughness distributions and uncertainty quantification.

The required computations can be performed in a highly efficient way, making the approach well suited for very large databases or even for online/on-board applications.

If route information (in terms of GPS coordinates) is available in addition, it is straightforward to correlate road roughness information (IRI distributions) to regions or also to certain route types generating further very valuable information for the derivation of usage- and market-specific design loads.