California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

Commercial heavy vehicle research at the California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) program has focused on the development of controllers for partially to fully automated driving environments. Safe performance of Advanced Vehicle Control Systems (AVCS) must be demonstrated for a wide range of operating conditions and truck configurations to avoid any one of the many failure modes-such as rollover or jackknifing-common to articulated heavy vehicles. For this purpose, a multi-body dynamic model of a tractor semitrailer has been developed using a commercially available dynamic analysis software program. Model parameters are based on a survey of heavy truck literature; the report discusses different types of component configurations and, in addition, provides numerical ranges for important physical parameters. Several safety performance measures along with associated maneuvers are proposed as a test to quantify overall safety of the controlled vehicle. keywords: commercial heavy vehicles, advanced vehicle control systems, multi-body dynamic model, safety performance measures, physical parameters