An Integrated Safety and Security Enforcement System (ISSES) for identifying high-risk heavy trucks was estimated to contribute to crash reductions between 63 and 629, personal injuries between 16 and163, and 7 fatalities per year.
Date Posted
12/21/2009
Identifier
2009-B00616
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Kentucky Commercial Vehicle Safety Applications Evaluation: Technical Report

Summary Information

The Integrated Safety and Security Enforcement System (ISSES) is an integrated, computer-aided system that serves as a real-time inspection-decision aid for selecting the highest-risk trucks for inspection among the pool of commercial vehicles. The first of its kind in the country, the ISSES was commissioned in June 2005 on a northbound weigh station on Interstate 75 near London, Kentucky. The USDOT sponsored an independent evaluation of the ISSES, known as the Commercial Vehicle Safety Applications (CVSA) Evaluation, that focused on system performance, inspection selection efficiency, and user acceptance/system costs.

The ISSES installed in the Interstate 71 weigh station in Kentucky was designed to increase the efficiency of vehicle inspections by automatically detecting high-risk heavy trucks, while not burdening inspectors with added duties or complexity. The overall goal of deploying the system was to enhance the screening of commercial trucks by more readily identifying those trucks that might pose safety hazards and/or unreasonable risks to homeland security. By obtaining data from a truck as it passed through a weigh station, the ISSES alerted inspectors to information revealing risk. Among the data collected by the ISSES were the following:

  • vehicle characteristics (speed, height, width, and length)
  • vehicle type (e.g., based on the number of axles)
  • thermal and visual anomalies of the vehicle, that reveal safety hazards
  • license plate number via an automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) system
  • USDOT number

Potential safety benefits of the ISSES were calculated by employing a Crash Avoidance model to estimate the number of Out-of-Service (OOS) trucks removed that would have caused a crash. The Crash Avoidance model used crash data from 2005 for large trucks in Kentucky and nationally to estimate the ISSES safety benefits across seven different inspection scenarios. The scenarios consisted of 44,000 vehicle inspections and 86,000 driver inspections in a year, with varying selection criteria. The baseline had random inspections and no ISSES. Subsequent scenarios employed screening based on criteria with increasing efficiency, from inspector experience and judgement alone, to inspector experience combined with electronic screening and thermal imaging. As screening algorithms become more effective, more OOS trucks were targeted for inspection and removed. The expanded screening criteria included 1) electronic screening based on a Kentucky OOS rate inspection selection algorithm, 2) electronic screening based on high vehicle and/or driver OOS rates, 3) electronic screening based on high driver OOS or brake violation rates, and 4) electronic screening based on infrared screening and high driver OOS violation rates.

The estimates indicated that the ISSES, in a range of scenarios, with 44,000 vehicle inspections and 86,000 driver inspections in a year, contributed to incremental reductions between 63 and 629 commercial vehicle-related crashes per year, reductions between 16 and 163 personal injuries, and reductions of up to 7 fatalities.

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