Work-in-Progress Report: Intelligent Traffic Road Weather and Safety Services for Heavy Vehicles

Accidents involving heavy road vehicles are often destructive, causing operational losses, human casualties, infrastructure losses, and negative environmental impacts. The risk is especially high in wintertime traffic. The Eureka Xecs SafeTrucks project (Heavy traffic safety improvements by advanced dynamics and road weather services) develops real-time vehicle-specific weather and safety services tailored to each vehicle, based on the vehicle’s own sensor-based observations combined with data from weather service systems and an analysis of the vehicle’s own dynamics. The services will also be analyzed by Digital Twin modeling in Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) and Driver-In-the-Loop (DIL) scenarios, in order to evaluate and refine them in a controlled environment. This paper focuses on operative fleet piloting, while the Digital Twin approach will be presented in future work. The pilot services are ultimately tested in a pilot system within operative heavy traffic. This paper presents the concept and architecture of the platform, with preliminary results of pilot services operation, alternative communication analysis, and system evaluation.