## Customer loads correlation in truck engineering

• Safety and reliability requirements on the one side and short development cycles, low costs and lightweight design on the other side are two competing aspects of truck engineering. For safety critical components essentially no failures can be tolerated within the target mileage of a truck. For other components the goals are to stay below certain predefined failure rates. Reducing weight or cost of structures often also reduces strength and reliability. The requirements on the strength, however, strongly depend on the loads in actual customer usage. Without sufficient knowledge of these loads one needs large safety factors, limiting possible weight or cost reduction potentials. There are a lot of different quantities influencing the loads acting on the vehicle in actual usage. These ‘influencing quantities’ are, for example, the road quality, the driver, traffic conditions, the mission (long haulage, distribution or construction site), and the geographic region. Thus there is a need for statistical methods to model the load distribution with all its variability, which in turn can be used for the derivation of testing specifications.

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