A Vision Based Technological Solution
'Monitoring and optimising heavy vehicle performance for safer and more efficient transport for all'
At Makro Transport Systems Ltd (MTS), we specialise in developing and marketing advanced suspension performance monitoring systems for heavy vehicles.
Our UK and internationally patented technological solution enables in-service monitoring of vehicle suspension system performance to facilitate a data driven operating environment where decisions can be made around highways use based upon a detailed knowledge of individual vehicle suspension performance. The use of Machine Learning can be applied to the task of image analysis in a way that can further reveal the suspension performance characteristics in a highly refined way, revealing through imagery the physics of what has been observed, providing rich data and further enabling the application of the technological solution under varying operational conditions. Operational performance data once gathered, can be filtered, collated and considered by highways and bridge managers for example, to help quantify and predict highways and bridge pavement damage and degradation due to the cyclic fatigue imparted upon it by heavy road freight. This enables those tasked with infrastructure management and forward planning to make informed decisions around freight access policy, offering for example mass concessions to freight vehicle operators whose vehicles conform to pre-defined 'road-friendly' suspension performance criteria. This type of freight policy is already being enacted in some global jurisdictions where axle mass limits are increased if road-friendly vehicle suspension is fitted to a vehicle, thereby improving freight task efficiency and mitigating pavement damage and degradation, whilst simultaneously verifying minimum freight vehicle dynamic performance, making the roads safer for all in the process.
The road freight task is growing. In the UK, the prevalence of Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) traffic (all categories of HGV) has increased on major roads including motorways by around 4% since 2010, motorways themselves representing just under 50% of road types in daily use by HGVs. The number of foreign registered HGVs using Great Britain's motorways as a percentage of all vehicles has been fairly steady at 5-6% of all traffic between 2010 and 2019. The total number of vehicles per day accessing Britain's motorways varies annually, but for example, the average number on the M1 (North of the M6 junction) totalled 103,000 per day between 2002 and 2022, growing to 110,000 per day in 2022. The average number of vehicles on the M25 East of the A1(M) to the M23 totals 122,000 per day between 2002 and 2022, having risen to 133,000 per day in 2022. Therefore, as the daily traffic count increases, so too does the number of HGVs using Britain's motorways and other road types. First and last miles of an HGV's journey can often be on A roads and minor roads for pick-up and delivery, the same roads used by thousands of Britain's car drivers every day of the week. This data summary was derived from Department for Transport Road traffic statistics (TRA)
The cost of remediation of damaged and degraded pavements is extremely high, consuming vast amounts of natural resources and causing transport disruption during repairs, with pavements often having become dangerously degraded prior to remediation. Identifying specific vehicles with under-performing suspension systems that are demonstrably the major contributors to pavement degradation has not been a focus, or readily achievable.
A March 2023 report from the Asphalt Industry Alliance states it is going to cost more than £12bn to repair all of Britain’s potholes, making the Chancellor’s additional £200m contribution over the next financial year a mere ‘drop in the ocean’. The report goes on to say that in the view of the Alliance, a much-needed long-term investment in roads is needed, estimating that the cost of repairing potholed local roads in England and Wales is £12.6 billion; roughly £61,700 for every mile of local road. In addition, recent analysis by the Local Government Association showed Government funding for maintaining England’s motorways and major A roads was 31 times higher per mile than for repairing local roads last year.
In November 2023 Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out how £8.3bn of promised funding will be used to tackle what he called the "scourge of potholes". The PM announced the money in October 2023 as part of plans to scrap part of the HS2 high-speed rail line and spend the savings on other projects. The funding will go to England's local councils over the next 11 years for road maintenance.
The Local Government Association (LGA), which represents councils in England and Wales, said said the cost of repairing local roads was closer to £14bn. Read full article from the BBC here.
Therefore, an unobtrusive, in-service oriented heavy vehicle suspension performance monitoring and reporting system can be seen as an enabler for quantifying the impact of individual heavy vehicles and vehicle types and configurations to pavement damage and degradation due to cyclic fatigue, which is exacerbated greatly by under-performing heavy vehicle suspension systems, and encouraging vehicle innovation.
Where vehicle manufacturers innovate and develop optimally damped, road-friendly suspension systems, these are certified as road-friendly based on as-built vibration damping characteristics and are type-approved based on the test results of the newly manufactured suspension. However, as there is currently no systematic performance testing of certified road-friendly suspension systems once they enter operational service on highways; their performance is not monitored or tested, despite they are in daily use on the highways infrastructure. This gap is a problem because any certified road-friendly suspension system fitted to a vehicle can suffer significant performance degradation over its life, which can run to many hundreds of thousands miles, without either the vehicle operator or a highways manager who may have granted increased mass concessions based on the as-built performance of the suspension system being aware. Therefore, pavement wear and damage due to under-performing heavy vehicle suspension systems remain a problem, with no visibility as to the root causes of accelerated wear and damage of pavements by highways managers, and less-safe vehicles with under-performing suspension systems remaining in operation on highways, undetected and representing a safety hazard to all road users. The technological solution from MTS is specifically designed to mitigate this gap in a way that is workable in practice and benefits vehicle operators, highways managers and all other road users.
Why bother?
Ultra-high resolution stable imaging
Image analysis - object recognition & tracking
