An approach to verify heavy vehicle driver fatigue compliance under Australian chain of responsibility regulations

Abstract

Heavy vehicle transportation is vital to the Australian logistics industry. However, it also experiences the highest number of work related accidents. Chain of responsibility regulations introduced by the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) extends obligations and liabilities for safety in heavy vehicle transport to all participants along with supply chains. As a result, finding mechanisms to support compliance with fatigue management rules has become important for the whole industry. The current compliance system is paper-based, and does not produce high quality compliance information and is proving to be expensive for supply chain participants to maintain. This paper presents an automated approach to verify heavy vehicle driver fatigue compliance. Drawing on data from a software tool (Logistics Fatigue Manager) developed by two of the authors, the automated approach deploys signature based detection techniques from Intrusion Detection Systems. The results highlight reduced costs, improved accuracy and speed of compliance verification.