SCIENTIFIC-TECHNOLOGICAL SUPPORT TO ENHANCING THE SAFETY OF SPECIAL ROAD AND RAIL VEHICLES

Increasing active and passive safety of road vehicles, especially commercial and special ones, undoubtedly leads to enhancing safety not only of vehicles themselves, but traffic in general, which is becoming one of the most important goals in scientific-technological development of a country. The decrease of mortality caused by traffic, and the damage resulting from road accidents, together with the decrease of damage caused by break-downs due to vehicle exploitation, represents the target of this project, in parallel with raising the level of science-technological, economical and ecological acceptability. In that respect, the following activities are undertaken within this project: (a) follow-up of the condition and identification of the critical subsystems of special road vehicles, in terms of their impact on the passive safety, (b) development of intelligent features of active safety system, together with increasing the reliability of these systems’ operation, through the development of their maintenance concept, (c) management of vehicle maintenance based on risk. Furthermore, low availability and frequent failures of rail vehicles are also the consequence of the inadequate maintenance policy. For this reason, a part of the project refers to enhancing the concept of rail vehicles maintenance as well, which is connected with road vehicles through the concept of risk, the final aim of which is lowering the exploitation cost and prolonging vehicle life cycle.