Brake-Based Stability Assistance Functions for Commercial Vehicles

Abstract

Vehicle stability functions like ABS, TCS, or ESP were firstly introduced on passenger vehicles. As the specific properties of heavy commercial vehicles lead to a very different behavior, the corresponding functions for commercial vehicles require at least significant modifications or in several cases completely new approaches to achieve the requested functionality.

With the stabilizing functions for commercial vehicles described in this chapter, at least a similar improvement of the vehicle safety could be achieved as for passenger cars. Due to the significantly higher inertia of heavy vehicles and the related more severe consequences in accidents, the lawmaker in Europe (and successively also in other parts of the world) decided to mandate the antilock braking (ABS) and the vehicle dynamics control (ESP).

This chapter focuses on the specifics of vehicle stability functions for commercial vehicles and their differences to similar functions for passenger vehicles.