LaSiBasis

Load securing on trucks plays a decisive role in road safety. Improperly secured loads can lead to dangerous situations that endanger other road users and cause accidents. An unsecured load can slip, tip over or even fall off the truck while driving, leading to abrupt braking manoeuvres or swerving movements and thus posing a danger to all road users.

Although improper load securing on trucks is a serious safety risk, there is often a lack of precise information on the number of accidents caused by this. It is suspected that the available data only represents the tip of the iceberg and that a high number of unreported cases must be assumed. This makes it impossible to assess the consequences of the accidents. It is equally questionable whether deficiencies in load securing are correctly identified and correctly assigned in the official accident statistics without other causes of accidents overriding them.

On the high-level road network, the loss of loads is the third most common cause of congestion after accidents and breakdowns. In the future, when trucks are automated and thus driverless, load errors, slippage or even fires in the load would possibly go completely unnoticed unless adequate measures are taken through the use of appropriate sensor technology and emergency procedures.

This is where the LaSiBasis research project, funded by the Austrian Road Safety Fund (VSF) and carried out by the Kuratorium für Verkehrssicherheit (KfV) together with the AIT, comes in: First of all, clear data on the actual number of road accidents related to load securing are to be provided in order to better understand the extent of the problem. Furthermore, the basic problems that lead to accidents in connection with load securing are to be identified. This information will serve as a basis for the development of appropriate risk minimisation measures. In addition, the aim is to comprehensively document possible faults in the area of load, load securing and the vehicle itself, which could go unnoticed in automated truck operation without the driver being present. A proposal for equipping the vehicle with sensors that can detect such operational faults will be developed and a demonstrator will be designed to test the effect of these sensors in a prototypical manner and to illustrate it clearly. Finally, clear recommendations will be formulated as to what measures can be taken today and in the future to prevent damage caused by inadequate load securing.

Within the framework of the project, AIT's road safety experts are responsible for the work package on load monitoring. An existing sensor system for recording vibro-acoustic signals is being further developed in order to test its use on truck loading areas. The sensors used can be flexibly attached with magnetic holders at any point in the truck and send data via an interface to a common processor. By simulating typical scenarios of problematic load securing on a demonstration vehicle, controlled test drives are to be carried out in order to specifically cause load tilting or shifting and record this with the help of the vibration and sound signals in the cargo area. The recorded data will be examined with regard to the feasibility of problem detection using vibro-acoustic signals. In addition, potential adaptations of the existing measurement system will be analysed in order to transmit appropriate warnings to vehicle users or the environment in manned or automated vehicles. The research focuses on the amount of training data required to reliably detect a load slip, effective positioning of the sensors and the reliability of the measurement system.

The AIT is also investigating the following aspects: the connection between roadways with poor longitudinal evenness and load losses, rear-end collisions with obstacles of all kinds, and incidents on the high-level road network that are associated with load losses.

Michael Aleksa, road safety expert at AIT: "Poor load securing on trucks is a significant road safety problem that leads to considerable personal injury and property damage due to numerous collisions. Against this background, the LaSiBasis project aims to implement an automatic detection of load loss as well as tipping, sliding and falling over of the load by means of adapted vibro-acoustic AIT sensor technology as a prototype within the framework of a demonstrator test".

LaSiBasis is funded by the Austrian Road Safety Fund (VSF).