Influence of Vehicle Characteristics on an Inductive Sensor Model for Traffic Applications

In this work we model an inductive loop detector with the purpose of studying the influence of significant vehicle characteristics on the obtained inductive signatures. Since this model will allow us to obtain the vehicle inductive signatures by means of a simulator without making use of expensive, not only in time but also in resources, tests in real scenarios, we will have a powerful tool to test some features of our inductive sensor prototype in advance. As shown with the results obtained using both the prototype and the inductive sensor simulator, the vehicle signatures exhibit similar characteristics in time and frequency domains, which validates the model used in this work. Moreover, several simulation results will show the impact of some physical parameters, such as the distance between the vehicle undercarriage and the loop under the road pavement, vehicle length or width, and its speed or acceleration, on their corresponding inductive signatures in both time and frequency domains. Additionally, a spectral feature extracted from the signatures in the frequency domain is studied using our software, giving us as a result that such an indicator suffers negligible variations with all the tested vehicle characteristics except for length, which is directly related to the type of vehicle. This remarkable dependence can be exploited for vehicle classification tasks