Alexander Lemken

• A vehicles fatigue damage is a highly relevant figure in the complete vehicle design process. Long term observations and statistical experiments help to determine the influence of differnt parts of the vehicle, the driver and the surrounding environment. This work is focussing on modeling one of the most important influence factors of the environment: road roughness. The quality of the road is highly dependant on several surrounding factors which can be used to create mathematical models. Such models can be used for the extrapolation of information and an estimation of the environment for statistical studies. The target quantity we focus on in this work ist the discrete International Roughness Index or discrete IRI. The class of models we use and evaluate is a discriminative classification model called Conditional Random Field. We develop a suitable model specification and show new variants of stochastic optimizations to train the model efficiently. The model is also applied to simulated and real world data to show the strengths of our approach.