Tire-pavement contact-aware weight estimation for multi-sensor WIM systems

Accurately estimating the weight of a moving vehicle at normal speed remains a challenging problem due to the complex vehicle dynamics and vehicle-pavement interaction. The weighing technique based on multiple sensors has proven to be an effective approach to this task. To improve the accuracy of weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems, this paper proposes a neural network-based method integrating identification and predication. A backpropagation neural network for signal classification (BPNN-i) was designed to identify ideal samples acquired by load sensors closest to the tire-pavement contact area. After that, ideal samples were used to predict the gross vehicle weight by using another backpropagation neural network (BPNN-e). The dataset for training and evaluation was collected from a multiple-sensor WIM (MS-WIM) system deployed in a public road. In our experiments, 96.89% of samples in the test set had an estimation error of less than 5%.