Vehicle Vertical Wearing Index (V2WI): active monitoring of wearing and aging of vertical-dynamics components in four-wheeled vehicles

Being able to assess the state-of-health of a vehicle opens of course many possible applications. All the more so if the ongoing degradation of the monitored components can be provided continuously as the vehicle life extends over time. In modern shared mobility systems, thanks to which migration from ownership to usership models should eventually take place, developing means to actively monitor the state of the vehicle fleet is crucial to improve business models and feasible and predictive maintenance plans. Within this challenging context, the present paper focuses on the monitoring of the vehicle vertical dynamics, to understand, from the analysis of measured data, which is the combined effect of driving-style and introduce road pavement roughness in determining the usage profile of the vertical-dynamics-related components of the vehicle, mostly the suspensions system. The proposed cost function concisely represents such wearing process, with the advantage of not requiring detailed parametric models of the vehicle dynamics and of the components themselves. The approach is tested on more than 9.000 km of trips carried out on four different vehicles, allowing to prove the effectiveness and generality of the approach.