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Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) systems for pedestrians have been predicted to offer substantial benefit. On this basis, consumer rating programmes, e.g. Euro NCAP, are developing rating schemes to encourage fitment of these systems. One of the questions that needs to be answered to do this fully, is to determine how the assessment of the speed reduction offered by the AEB is integrated with the current assessment of the passive safety for mitigation of pedestrian injury. Ideally, this should be done on a benefit related basis. The objective of this research was to develop a benefit based methodology for assessment of integrated pedestrian protection systems with pre-crash braking and passive safety components. A methodology has been developed which calculates the cost of pedestrian injury expected, assuming all pedestrians in the target population (i.e. pedestrians impacted by the front of a passenger car) are impacted by the car being assessed, taking into account the impact speed reduction offered by the car’s AEB (if fitted) and the passive safety protection offered by the car’s frontal structure. For rating purposes, this cost can be normalised by comparing it to the cost calculated for selected cars. The methodology uses the speed reductions measured in AEB tests to determine the speed at which each casualty in the target population will be impacted. The injury to each casualty is then calculated using the results from standard Euro NCAP pedestrian impactor tests and injury risk curves. This injury is converted into cost using ‘Harm’ type costs for the body regions tested. These costs are weighted and summed. Weighting factors were determined using accident data from Germany and GB and the results of a benefit analysis performed by the EU FP7 AsPeCSS project. This resulted in German and GB versions of the methodology. The methodology was used to assess cars with good, average and poor Euro NCAP pedestrian ratings, with and without a current AEB system fitted. It was found that the decrease in casualty injury cost achieved by fitting an AEB system was approximately equivalent to that achieved by increasing the passive safety rating from poor to average. Also, it was found that the assessment was influenced strongly by the level of head protection offered in the scuttle and windscreen area because this is where head impact occurs for a large proportion of casualties. The major limitation within the methodology is the assumption used implicitly during weighting. This is that the cost of casualty injuries to body areas, such as the thorax, not assessed by the headform and legform impactors, and other casualty injuries such as those caused by ground impact, are related linearly to the cost of casualty injuries assessed by the impactors. A methodology for assessment of integrated pedestrian protection systems was developed. This methodology is of interest to consumer rating programmes which wish to include assessment of these systems. It also raises the interesting issue if the head impact test area should be weighted to reflect better real-world benefit.
Research to inform policy is often challenged with how to genuinely use and implement research findings in decision-making and policy-planning. To begin with, the dialogue between researchers and decision-makers is essential to ensure profound understanding and legitimate interpretations of the results. Furthermore, the step to drawing practical conclusions and processing them into actions can only succeed if research findings are diffused to decision-making levels with influence on the matter, and mechanisms to knowledge transfer in the presence of a stable, favourable policy environment exist. Research investments into the topic of electromobility in Europe are substantial, and subtopics aiming to inform national policy-makers address a complex set of aspects from environmental and societal to technological and economic. This paper has a two-fold objective, the first of which is to present the results of scenarios to explore electromobility deployment in Finland, Germany and the European Union. The second is to discuss the challenges and solutions to bridge the gap from research findings towards decision-making and policy-planning, using the authors' electromobility scenario work as an example. The electromobility scenarios were built using the VECTOR21 model (Mock, 2010), and the rationale was to simulate vehicle sales and markets under different policy settings and calculate the most economical solution to fulfill regulation on COâ‚‚ emissions as set by the European Commission (2009). The model allows calculating the market diffusion of alternative powertrain technologies to the European market until 2030, taking into account different taxation schemes, incentives and other country-specific characteristics. The authors also present the cost-benefit-analysis of the modelling results to assess the different scenarios and to show variation between regions regarding profitability of alternative technological or political support and interventions. To proceed from research findings towards decision-making and policy-planning, the authors made observations relating to transfer of research knowledge and interpretation of their electromobility scenario results in national policy contexts. An evaluation of how the function of research to inform policy in this case succeeded is provided. In addition, the influence of expert opinions on the political decision-making process will be discussed through experiences from an expert questionnaire conducted to survey the importance of costs, time requirement, acceptance and other criteria of promotion measures of electromobility.
The Decision Support System (DSS) is one of the key objectives of the European co-funded research project SafetyCube in order to better support evidence-based policy making. Results will be assembled in the form of a DSS that will present for each suggested road safety measure: details of risk factor tackled, measure, best estimate of casualty reduction effectiveness, cost-benefit evaluation and analytic background. The development of the DSS presents a great potential to further support decision making at local, regional, national and international level, aiming to fill in the current gap of comparable measures effectiveness evaluation. In order to provide policy-makers and industry with comprehensive and well-structured information about measures, it is essential that a systems approach is used to ensure the links between risk factors and all relevant safety measures are made fully visible. The DSS is intended to become a major source of information for industry, policy-makers and the wider road safety community.
For the estimation of the benefit and effect of innovative Driver Assistance Systems (DAS) on the collision positions and by association on the accident severity, together with the economic benefit, it becomes necessary to simulate and evaluate a variety of virtual accidents with different start values (e.g. initial speed). Taken into account the effort necessary for a manual reconstruction, only an automated crash computation can be considered for this task. This paper explains the development of an automated crash computation based on GIDAS. The focus will be on the design of the virtual vehicle models, the method of the crash computation as well as exemplary applications of the automated crash computation. For the first time an automated crash computation of passenger car accidents has been realized. Using the automated crash computation different tasks within the field of vehicle safety can be elaborated. This includes, for example, the calculation of specific accident parameters (such as EES or delta-V) for various accident constellations and the estimation of the economic benefit of DAS using IRFs (Injury Risk Functions).
A biofidelic flexible pedestrian legform impactor (FlexPLI) has been developed from the year 2000 onwards and evaluated by a technical evaluation group (Flex-TEG) of UN-ECE GRSP. A recently established UN-ECE GRSP Informal Group on GTR9 Phase 2 is aiming at introducing the FlexPLI within world-wide regulations on pedestrian safety (Phase 2 of GTR No. 9 as well as the new UN regulation 127 on pedestrian safety) as a test tool for the assessment of lower extremity injuries in lateral vehicle-to-pedestrian accidents. Besides, the FlexPLI has already been introduced within JNCAP and is on the Euro NCAP roadmap for 2014. Despite of the biofidelic properties in the knee and tibia sections, several open issues related to the FlexPLI, like the estimation of the cost benefit, the feasibility of vehicle compliance with the threshold values, the robustness of the impactor and of the test results, the comparability between prototype and production level and the finalization of certification corridors still needed to be solved. Furthermore, discussions with stakeholders about a harmonized lower legform to bumper test area are still going on. This paper describes several studies carried out by the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) regarding the benefit due to the introduction of the FlexPLI within legislation for type approval, the robustness of test results, the establishment of new assembly certification corridors and a proposal for a harmonized legform to bumper test area. Furthermore, a report on vehicle tests that previously had been carried out with three prototype legforms and were now being repeated using legforms with serial production status, is given. Finally, the paper gives a status report on the ongoing simulation and testing activities with respect to the development and evaluation of an improved test procedure with upper body mass for assessing pedestrian femur injuries.
For a number of EU regulatory acts Virtual Testing (VT) is already allowed for type approval (see Commission Regulation No. 371/2010 of 16 April 2010 amending the Framework Directive 2007/46/EC). However, only a very general procedure on how to apply VT for type approval is provided. Technical details for specific regulatory acts are not given yet. The main objective of the European project IMVITER (IMplementation of VIrtual TEsting in Safety Regulations) was to promote the implementation of VT in safety regulations. When proposing VT procedures the new regulation was taken into account, in particular, addressing open issues. Special attention was paid to pedestrian protection as pilot cases. A key aspect for VT implementation is to demonstrate that the employed simulation models are reliable. This paper describes how the Verification and Validation (V&V) method defined by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers was adapted for pedestrian protection VT based assessment. or the certification of headform impactors an extensive study was performed at two laboratories to assess the variability in calibration tests and equivalent results from a set of simulation models. Based on these results a methodology is defined for certification of headform impactor simulation models. A similar study was also performed with one vehicle in the type approval test setup. Its bonnet was highly instrumented and subjected to 45 impacts in five different positions at two laboratories in order to obtain an estimation of the variability in the physical tests. An equivalent study was performed using stochastic simulation with a metamodel fed with observed variability in impact conditions of physical headforms. An estimation of the test method uncertainty was obtained and used in the definition of a validation corridor for simulation models. Validation metric and criteria were defined in cooperation with the ISO TC22 SC10 and SC12 WG4 "Virtual Testing". A complete validation procedure including different test setups, physical magnitudes and evaluation criteria is provided. A detailed procedural flowchart is developed for VT implementation in EC Regulation No 78/2009 based on a so called "Hybrid VT" approach, which combines real hardware based head impact tests and simulations. This detailed flowchart is shown and explained within this paper. Another important point within the virtual testing based procedures is the documentation of relevant information resulting from the verification and validation process of the numerical models used. For this purpose report templates were developed within the project. The proposed procedure fixes minimum V&V requirements for numerical models to be confidently used within the type-approval process. It is not intended to be a thorough guide on how to build such reliable models. Different modeling methodologies are therefore possible, according to particular OEM know-how. These requirements respond to a balance amongst the type-approval stakeholders interests. A cost-benefit analysis, which was also performed within the IMVITER project, supports this approach, showing the conditions in which VT implementation is beneficial. Based on the experience gained in the project and the background of the experts involved an outlook is given as a roadmap of VT implementation, identifying the most important milestones to be reached along the way to a future vehicle type approval procedure supported by VT. The results presented in this paper show an important step addressing open questions and fostering the future acceptance of virtual testing in pedestrian protection type approval procedures.
In the last years there has been a decline in accident figures in Germany especially for four wheeled vehicles. At the same time, accident figures for motorcycles remained nearly constant. About 17 % of road traffic fatalities in the year 2006 were motorcyclists. 33 % of these riders were killed in single vehicle crashes. This leads to the conclusion that improving driving dynamics and driving stability of powered two wheelers would yield considerable safety gains. However, the well-known measures for cars and trucks with their proven effectiveness cannot be transferred easily to motorcycles. Therefore studies were carried out to examine the safety potential of Anti Lock Braking Systems (ABS) and Vehicle Stability Control (VSC) for motorcycles by means of accident analysis, driving tests and economical as well as technical assessment of the systems. With regard to ABS, test persons were assigned braking tasks (straight and in-curve) with five different brake systems with and without ABS. Stopping distances as well as stress and strain on the riders were measured for 9 test riders who completed 105 braking manoeuvres each. Knowing the ability of ABS to avoid falls during braking in advance of a crash and taking into account the system costs, a cost benefit analysis for ABS for motorcycles was carried out for different market penetration of ABS, i.e. equipment rates, and different time horizons. The potential of VSC for motorcycles was estimated in two steps. First the kinds of accidents that could be prevented by such a system at all have been analysed. For these accident configurations, simulations and driving tests were then performed to determine if a VSC was able to detect the critical driving situation and if it was technically possible to implement an actuator which would help to stabilise the critical situation.
Although the number of road accident casualties in Europe (EU27) is falling the problem still remains substantial. In 2011 there were still over 30,000 road accident fatalities. Approximately half of these were car occupants and about 60 percent of these occurred in frontal impacts. The next stage to improve a car's safety performance in frontal impacts is to improve its compatibility. The objective of the FIMCAR FP7 EU-project was to develop an assessment approach suitable for regulatory application to control a car's frontal impact and compatibility crash performance and perform an associated cost benefit analysis for its implementation. This paper reports the cost benefit analyses performed to estimate the effect of the following potential changes to the frontal impact regulation: • Option 1 " No change and allow current measures to propagate throughout the vehicle fleet. • Option 2 " Add a full width test to the current offset Deformable Barrier (ODB) test. • Option 3 " Add a full width test and replace the current ODB test with a Progressive Deformable Barrier (PDB) test. For the analyses national data were used from Great Britain (STATS 19) and from Germany (German Federal Statistical Office). In addition in-depth real word crash data were used from CCIS (Great Britain) and GIDAS (Germany). To estimate the benefit a generalised linear model, an injury reduction model and a matched pairs modelling approach were applied. The benefits were estimated to be: for Option 1 "No change" about 2.0%; for Option 2 "FW test" ranging from 5 to 12% and for Option 3 "FW and PDB tests" 9 to 14% of car occupant killed and seriously injured casualties.
This work aims at bringing evidence for mass incompatibility in frontal impact for cars built according to the UNECE R94 regulation. French national injury accidents database census for years 2005 to 2008 were used for the analysis. The heterogeneity of frontal self-protection among cars of different masses is investigated, as well as the partner protection parameter offered by these cars. The last part of the analysis deals with the estimation of the benefit, in terms of fatal and severe injuries avoided, if crashworthiness was harmonized for the whole fleet of vehicle. This calculation is done for France and is extended to all Europe.
This paper describes the methodology for the assessment of the socio-economic impact of SAFESPOT applications. The applications selected for the assessment cover vehicle to vehicle (v2v) as well as vehicle to infrastructure (v2i) communication systems. The applications address main problem areas of road safety: accidents at intersections, accidents due to hazardous road and weather conditions and accidents due to over speeding and inappropriate distance. The assessment methodology relies in its core on cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as the most widespread tool to assess the profitability of applications form the society point of view. The assessment is however not limited to CBA but also considers the economic effects for particular stakeholder groups such as users, public authorities and the like. Their individual cost and benefits can be investigated in stakeholder analyses. Both elements, CBA and stakeholder analysis, form an integrated assessment approach which is applied here. The assessment makes use of the sound methodological base which was provided by projects such as SEiSS and eIMPACT. Some characteristics of co-operative systems however call for special attention within the assessment. Most prominently, the assessment will concentrate on a bundle of applications. The impact of this bundle will be assessed under the conditions of different business and service models. These issues will be addressed in the paper. Moreover, this paper also provides insight in likely patterns of results and first results of socio-economic impact assessment itself.