Overloaded heavy vehicles is currently big issue in Europe. It is proved that overloading contributes to shortening the fatigue life of the pavement structure. To counteract this unfavourable phenomenon, effective tools for the elimination of overloaded vehicles should be developed, one of them being the use of Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) systems. In our work, we show how the accuracy of weighing in WIM systems affects the efficiency of vehicle elimination from road traffic and how this is translated to the road pavement durability. We took into account the weighing results from real WIM site equipped with 16 axle load sensors. The sensitivity of the pavement structure durability to the elimination of overloaded vehicles was analyzed. The obtained results allowed to state that with the increase of system accuracy (which allows to increase the percentage of overloaded vehicles eliminated from traffic), the global load factor for the entire vehicle decreases and thus the fatigue life of the road pavement increases. Completed calculations show that in the case of rigid pavements (cement concrete), the elimination of overloaded vehicles will result in an even greater increase in durability than in case of flexible structures (asphalt pavement). A sensible solution seems to be the use of WIM system with accuracy of 6% which translate to use 5 to 7 axle load sensors. Further increase of number of sensors does not give such large effects in terms of extending the fatigue life of the road pavement.

Weigh-in-motion systems, WIM, accuracy, road pavement durability, overloaded vehicles, axle load equivalency coefficient.