Research on Heavy Vehicles

Research Project 1: Heavy Vehicle Smart Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement

One of my recent research projects was about the technologies of heavy vehicle smart compliance monitoring, tracking and enforcement in practice, both nationally and internationally.  

The road agencies in Australia collect extensive data from road-side sensors (e.g. vehicle classifiers, weigh in motions (WiM), and ANPR cameras), but due to lack of integration and low accuracy of sensors (due to annual calibration costs), these data cannot be fully utilised for compliance monitoring and direct enforcement.  This raises a number of research questions such as the concept of virtual WiM that can be tested and validated using the existing data.

I am looking for interested postgraduate and Honours thesis applicants to continue this research topic.

Research Project 2: Heavy Vehicle Telematics Data Analysis, 2018-19

Being on a supervisory team, I collaborated with Mehdi Taghavi, a PhD student from the School of Civil Engineering, University of Queensland on a freight data analytics project. In this project we applied a Hidden Markov Chain Model to identify the trip segments and impute truck stop types (rest stops vs. activity vs. non-activity stops) from a Big GPS data. 

The proposed Continuous Hidden Markov model proved to be efficient to identify trip segments and type of stops from over 71 million GPS un-labelled records without a need for driver logbooks or complementary surveys. The identification of trip segments and stop locations helps logistics firms, analysts, infrastructure managers and regulators to collect and understand critical information about where and when truck drivers stop to fulfil their legal rest requirements, load or unload their cargo, refuel their vehicle and/or conclude their trip. 

I presented the findings of this study in the  22nd IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference in Oct 2019, at Auckland. You can find the presentation slides here.

The final paper is under review, but for further details, please refer to the following publications:

• Mehdi Taghavi; Irannezhad, Elnaz; Prato, Carlo; Imputation of Truck Rest Stop Events from GPS Data with a Continuous Hidden Markov Model. Accepted for the presentation in the Transportation Research Board (TRB) 99th Annual Meeting, Washington D.C. USA. 12-16 January 2020. Download

• Mehdi Taghavi; Irannezhad, Elnaz; Prato, Carlo (2019); Identifying Truck Stops from a Large Stream of GPS Data via a Hidden Markov Chain Model; The 22nd IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC). Auckland, New Zealand, 27-30 October 2019; DOI: 10.1109/ITSC.2019.8917156. Download Full Text

Previous Industry Projects

Freight Data Requirement Study,  2018

This iMove CRC project was commissioned by the Department of Infrastructure Regional Development and Cities (DIRDC) and was a consortium of a number of institutes including Australian Road Research Board (ARRB), University of New South Wales (UNSW), and Deakin University. As the Lead of the team at the University of Queensland,  I delivered the chapter of “Freight Data Gaps” and contributed in the final report. 

Outcomes of this study attracted an $8.5 million commitment in the recent Federal budget to establish the National Freight Data Hub. The proposed Freight Data Hub will play an essential and central role in coordinating and integrating the public and private sectors to collect, analyse and disseminate freight data. This hub, if it is set up as an independent trusted body, can engage both private and public sector, maintaining their businesses interests and confidentiality concerns.

To download the full report and further details, see the related news.

From Roots to Routes study , 2018

Collaborating with Dr Ken Doust from the Southern Cross University, I delivered the modelling report for this research grant commissioned by the Northern River NSW Regional Government. The disseminated report, “From Roots to Routes: a ground-up approach to freight and supply chain planning for the Northern Rivers NSW”, provided a strategy identifying 20 initiatives to realise the vision for the freight and supply chain network and needs of the Northern Rivers Region. 

Who Moves What Where study,  2016

Teaming up with Honorary Assoc. Prof. Adam Pekol, we delivered this project, commissioned by the National Transport Commission (NTC). In this project, I was the chief investigator.  Supervised by Adam, I conducted an extensive survey of passenger and freight transport data and I drafted the “Who Moves What Where” Information Paper. The outcomes of this project triggered major data collection and dissemination practices at the national level.