Design and Prototyping of Weigh-In-Motion and Overload Detection System for Freight Vehicle

The high number of freight vehicles that exercised overloading in Indonesia has led to a significant reduction in the quality of road pavement. The obsolete overload detection system using weigh bridges have been ineffective, since it requires vehicles to maneuver and enter the weighing station. In the above system, after manual checking, overloaded vehicles will be penalized. The Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) device that is developed in this research utilized a bending plate sensor with strain gage. As overloaded vehicle runs over the WIM, axle weight will be automatically recorded, and the data is processed further to assess the compliance to maximum freight weight as specified for the vehicle. In this research work, the WIM prototype is developed and tested using motorcycle under normal operation and overloaded conditions at different speeds. Arduino based signal processing and analysis system has been developed such that the overload detection may be performed automatically. When the system senses an overloaded vehicle, it will automatically trigger the alarm and a camera will capture the vehicle. The error of the prototype is within acceptable range and the system has shown the potential to detect whether the vehicle, i.e., the motorcycle, is overloaded or not. As a continuation, the development of a reliable microcontroller-based WIM and a robust automatic overloaded freight vehicle will be our future work.