Abstract
Active safety of vehicle combinations during braking highly depends on braking compatibility behavior. There are different influencing factors disabling partial deceleration of individual elements of a vehicle combination to be "compatible", or balanced. The paper deals with an advanced friction monitoring system, which may be used in braking systems of vehicle combinations to improve braking compatibility behavior. This system should enable better monitoring of braking force variation but also an improved braking force management with respect to vehicle combination compatibility behavior during braking. Digital brake models are developed here for this purpose. They may relate analytically or numerically a braking force developed in each individual brake of a vehicle combination with the most dominant influencing factors, and in particular with the application pressure. That is how an advanced friction monitoring system anticipates frictional behavior of brakes in the next brake application based on the hisedent brake applications. Such an advanced friction monitoring system does not impose any hardware extension to those vehicles, which already are equipped with traction control systems. Only a part of an ECU should be dedicated to deal with the stored friction models and to align them with actual control line pressure values and relevant traction force values. A predetermined control procedure performed by an ECU as described in the paper would manage the control line pressure of the vehicle combination with respect to application pressure in every individual brake, using an artificial intelligence algorithm.