Apparato per tracciare lo stato della superficie di un pavimento e procedimento di bilanciamento dinamico di un tale apparato

Potentialities of a Highway Alignment Optimization Method in an I-BIM Environment

The BIM (Building Information Modeling) approach potential in the civil engineering field opened novel scenarios in the design idea concept, from planning to executive and constructive phases. The related advantages are numerous and not only limited to a real-time interaction among the involved subjects, that can actually operate in an optimized 3D shared environment. Owing to the sharing information philosophy and to the features of various "smart objects" combined in the project, this innovation reduces potential errors and increases the effectiveness of the design solution in terms of both functionality and cost. Despite these advantages, the highway alignment design problem remains very…

Automatic crack detection results using a novel device for survey and analysis of road pavement condition

To accurately schedule maintenance operations, it is crucial to monitor the pavement state and, thus, evaluate the structural and functional indices during its entire service life. In particular, surface conditions (cracks, potholes, patches, rutting, etc.) must be properly checked – especially in terms of detection, identification, and classification of distresses – for avoiding reaching dangerous values for users (overpassing safety thresholds). However, monitoring and survey activities can be so costly (not only in economic terms, but further considering the execution time) to discourage their execution, with evident drawbacks for a proper maintenance management and the related intervent…

How is the Driver's Workload Influenced by the Road Environment?

Abstract This paper focuses on the study of the driver's workload while driving on a rural two-lane road with different traffic flows. The aim of the research is to examine a parameter that could be representative of the driving effort, quite sensible to the external factors that cause disturbance to the regular driving activity. To solve this problem, the authors used a specific instrumented vehicle for monitoring some physiological parameters of the driver (as the eye movements and the Galvanic Skin Resistance), referring their values to the road context. The results are very interesting and confirm that knowing the workload is useful to improve the road safety only if it is related to th…

ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENT VISUAL STRATEGIES OF 'ISOLATED VEHICLE' AND 'DISTURBED VEHICLE'

This paper analyses the driver’ visual behaviour in the different conditions of ‘isolated vehicle’ and ‘disturbed vehicle’. If the meaning of the former is clear, the latter condition considers the influence on the driving behaviour of various objects that could be encountered along the road. These can be classified in static (signage, stationary vehicles at the roadside, etc.) and dynamic objects (cars, motorcycles, bicycles). The aim of this paper is to propose a proper analysis regarding the driver’s visual behaviour. In particular, the authors examined the quality of the visually informa-tion acquired from the entire road environment, useful for detecting any critical safety condition. …