Electronic Data Acquisition and Analysis for the NHTSA ABS Fleet Evaluation

Antilock brake systems for air braked vehicles have been growing in popularity in Great Britain and Europe and appear to be candidates for extensive use in the United States as well. Previous mandated use in the United States during the 1970's was not successful, in part because of reliability problems, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has decided that a thorough evaluation of air brake antilock systems is necessary prior to any decision about the appropriateness of future mandatory use in the United States.

This paper describes the electronic data collection equipment and processing techniques which are being used in the NHTSA 200 truck evaluation project. Detailed maintenance histories for each truck are being recorded manually as a separate segment of the project.

An average of 6 to 7 megabytes of data per week is being collected in the various cities in which fleets are operating test vehicles. After collection, the data are compressed and automatically transmitted to Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio for testing, processing, and analysis.