Project Goal:

To evaluate the efficacy of Tire Safety Screening Systems (TS3s) in identifying potential tire violations, ORNL will collect inspection data along with supplemental data from partnering States to statistically determine if TS3s provide an increased rate of tire violations compared to not having the system at all.

Background:

Utilizing roadside technology to increase the efficiency of the inspection process by identifying vehicles with potential component violations has been an ongoing challenge.  Few systems exist that can accurately determine the presence of a vehicle defect without a visual inspection, including weigh-in-motion (WIM), infrared based screening systems (IBSS), and now tire safety screening systems (TS3s).  ORNL was previously tasked with identifying the location and effectiveness of the International Road Dynamics (IRD) Tire Anomaly Classification System (TACS) tire screening system to determine how they were being utilized and what problems existed with the usage of this technology.  As part of this task five States were interviewed to identifying how accurate the system was and how the system was used in their State.  All the interviewed States had high praise of the system anecdotally stating that vehicles were flagged frequently and with great accuracy. Since this study concluded, Kistler was identified as another provider of TS3s with their Automatic Tire Screening System (ATSS), which has a similar method of identifying potential tire issues of heavy vehicles on the mainline.

Summary:

The project will be broken into three tasks to first identify the location of TS3 installations to select potential State partners.  The next step is to quantify how large a problem tire violations are in the current inspection process to determine a baseline for comparison.  Next, data collection will be performed with partnering jurisdictions with analysis of how well the system performs.  Lastly, a final report will be prepared with a summary of analysis and recommendations for optimal use cases and future search areas for TS3s.

Contractor:

DOE/ORNL