The possibility of wireless sensor networks for commercial vehicle load monitoring

Abstract

It is of great importance to be able to monitor and enforce vehicle weight limits for road authorities involved in almost all aspects of transportation and pavement engineering. For the active control of additional weight carried by overloaded vehicles, essential IT technologies such as sensors, measurement, and data processing have been applied. The integration of vehicle load monitoring systems with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) technology has a possibility of reducing installation efforts and costs, and enabling the quick and easy configuration of data acquisition and control systems. In this paper, we try to verify that WSN technology can replace the wiring sensor applications for vehicle monitoring issues. The WSN-based system includes: inclinometer sensors which measure variation of inclination values with load changes;, an Access Point (AP) that logs the data collected from all these sensors;, and a weight estimation algorithm. To reach the goal, we performed an experiment with real deployment and estimated the weight of trucks with an error of less than 3%. The result shows that it is possible to adopt WSN for commercial vehicle load monitoring.