Based on Coroners' verdicts, fatigue of car or truck drivers was a contributing factor in 9.1% of fatal accidents involving trucks. Based on the presence of factors such as extended driving hours, falling asleep at the wheel, comments about tiredness, driving right of centre and night-time driving, the authors estimated fatigue contributed to 19.9% of the accidents. There were approximately equ...

Computer simulations are widely used in the truck industry in order to provide assistance in the product development. Bolt joints are common in trucks. A bolt fracture usually has a great influence on how a truck structure will behave in a crash. Therefore, when simulating truck crashes it is important to be able to predict when bolt fracture occurs. A material model for 10.9 bolts has been cal...

Providing long distance truck drivers with adequate access to prevention, testing, and treatment services for HIV, Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), Tuberculosis (TB), and Malaria is suggested to be an extremely effective way to reduce the burden and the spread of these diseases. However, truck drivers need to overcome large barriers in order to obtain these services at the traditional he...

Fuzzy control systems and neural-network control systems for backing up a simulated truck, and truck-and-trailer, to a loading dock in a parking lot are presented. The supervised backpropagation learning algorithm trained the neural network systems. The robustness of the neural systems was tested by removing random subsets of training data in learning sequences. The neural systems performed wel...

While organizing the cross-docking operations, cross-dock managers are confronted with many decision problems. One of these problems is the truck scheduling problem. This article presents a truck scheduling problem that is concerned with both inbound and outbound trucks at multiple dock doors. The objective is to minimize the total travel time and the total tardiness. The truck scheduling probl...

Team Oshkosh, composed of Oshkosh Corporation, Teledyne Scientific and Imaging Company, VisLab of the University of Parma, Ibeo Automotive Sensor GmbH, and Auburn University, participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge and was one of the 11 teams selected to compete in the final event. Through development, testing, and participation in the official events, we experimented and demonstrated autonom...

This paper deals with an investigation of different control strategies for a series hybrid electric vehicle (SHEV). Another discussed issue is the application of a free-piston generator. By replacing a conventional combustion engine with a free-piston generator it is possible to increase the total efficiency of the system. The object of investigation is a 12-ton truck, mainly used in urban area...

This paper describes technology (hardware and software) that has been developed to estimate the volume of material contained within the tray of various haul trucks. Such information is critical to truck utilization and thus can provide information that could lead to significant gains in productivity. The system consists of a field computer and two proximity lasers. The lasers are placed high ab...

Previous studies report that truck drivers are at increased risk for illness and on-the-job mortality. It is unknown whether owner-operator truck drivers face the same risks as employee drivers, yet few studies have targeted owner-operators as a study population. This study examined the overall and cause-specific mortality ratios for a cohort with owner-operator truck drivers constituting 69% o...

In order to reduce the wastage and loss of petroleum products in transit, a monitoring and management system is proposed for tank truck transportation. In this system, a vehicle transport recorder is developed to record the operations of inputs and outputs of a tank truck via a kind of Hall Effect switch sensors. Wireless data transceivers are designed to start and stop monitoring in the starti...