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The number of fatal crashes involving heavy vehicles (HVs) has dramatically increased world-wide over the last decade. In the United States, fatalities due to collisions involving large trucks increased by 41% in 2017 compared to 2009 (National Center for Statistics and Analysis 2019). The percentage increase in deaths from 2015 to 2016 was around 9.6% in the European Union (European Commission 2018). In Australia, 188 people died from 173 fatal crashes involving HVs in 2019; the increase was approximately 27.2% compared to 2018 (BITRE 2019). Due to Queensland’s vast geographical size, drivers of HVs travel large distances, thereby increasing their chances of fatigue and isolation (Raftery et al. 2011). This becomes more critical as the number of HVs on Queensland’s road network increase (TMR 2019). For instance, the number of HVs registered in Queensland increased by 0.5% in 2020 compared to 2019 (TMR 2020a). Statistics from 2011 revealed that the percentage of fatal and serious injury crashes involving HVs in Australia were nearly 18% while they were only 3% of the total registered vehicles (Assemi and Hickman 2018).

The collisions involving HVs, especially large trucks travelling on undivided highways, often result in injury severities relatively higher than Rear-end and collisions at signalised Intersections (Zhu and Srinivasan, 2011). The Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) has established a five-stage heavy vehicle study to analyze HV crashes on its state-controlled road network between 2012 and 2016 (Paz et al., 2020). Their study reported that the fatality rate for Head-on collisions was 35 …