A Method to Correlate Weigh-in-Motion and Classification Data

This report looks at low-cost vehicle classifiers to provide some indication of pavement loading or gross vehicle mass (GVM). WIM equipment is relatively expensive to install and calibrate, and may not be easily installed anywhere in a road network. It is therefore desirable that a vehicle classifier located on the network can give an indication of the GVM at that location, based on the loading characteristics of the WIM equipment in that state. The proposed methodology in this report aims to identify, from a list of candidate WIM sites (therefore with known GVM frequency distributions), the one that can give the best indication of the GVM distribution at a classifier site. The method was developed at Main Roads WA and initially investigated at VicRoads. It has been further refined at ARRB and requires the use of piezoelectric cables in the vehicle classifier to give some indication of the loading characteristics of a classifier site.