The assessment of real-world effectiveness of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is gainin... more The assessment of real-world effectiveness of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is gaining importance as more and more systems enter the market. Many different approaches have been developed. Therefore, the automobile industry, universities, and automotive research institutes in Europe have started an initiative for cooperative research. A ‘Harmonization Group’ was established in 2012 whose motivation is the development of a comprehensive, reliable, transparent, and thus accepted methodology for quantitative assessment of these systems by virtual simulation. The harmonization group focuses on prospective analysis, which has the objective to estimate the expected safety benefits of current and beyond-state-of-the-art applications. Commonly used methods for prospective analyses are FOT's, subject studies in driving simulators, on closed test tracks or on open roads, and virtual analyses by means of simulation. Currently, the basis for an assessment by virtual simulation ca...
Up to now quite a few electronic safety functions have been developed in order to successfully in... more Up to now quite a few electronic safety functions have been developed in order to successfully increase the safety of passenger in vehicles. Among them are electronic stability control (ESC), brake assists (BAS), lane departure warning systems (LDW) and so on. There exists a short literature on the quantification of the effectiveness of such safety systems on injury outcome or crash severity. As an example the ESC in several studies impressively has been shown to be efficient in avoiding a considerable amount of loss of control or skidding accidents. Nowadays many recently registered vehicles are equipped not only with one but instead with a number of safety functions (so- called safety equipment). The present paper proposes sound statistical methodology in order to investigate the safety benefit of such composite safety equipments (in contrast to a single safety function) in passenger vehicles. It seems obvious that the effectiveness of a specific safety equipment not simply is the...
Volume 2: 31st Design Automation Conference, Parts A and B, 2005
ABSTRACT Road Safety System development is complex task, which requires the collaboration between... more ABSTRACT Road Safety System development is complex task, which requires the collaboration between designers and accidentologists. However, designers and accidentologists do not share the same viewpoints, neither the same models to analyze an accident, nor the same technical language. This makes their communication a complex task in a design process. Accident Scenario is recognized as a powerful communication tool between designers and accidentologists. Nevertheless, an accident scenario has to be presented in a way that both designers and accidentologists can understand and use. To address this issue, we use the systemic approach (a complex system modeling approach) to develop a new methodology allowing constructing multi-view accident scenarios.
This study set out to evaluate the effectiveness of low speed autonomous emergency braking (AEB) ... more This study set out to evaluate the effectiveness of low speed autonomous emergency braking (AEB) technology in current model passenger vehicles, based on real-world crash experience. The validating vehicle safety through meta-analysis (VVSMA) group comprising a collaboration of government, industry consumer organisations and researchers, pooled data from a number of countries using a standard analysis format and the established MUND approach. Induced exposure methods were adopted to control for any extraneous effects. The findings showed a 38 percent overall reduction in rear-end crashes for vehicles fitted with AEB compared to a comparison sample of similar vehicles. There was no statistical evidence of any difference in effect between urban (≤60km/h) and rural (>60km/h) speed zones. Areas requiring further research were identified and widespread fitment through the vehicle fleet is recommended.
This paper proposes to estimate and to compare the expected and the observed effectiveness of the... more This paper proposes to estimate and to compare the expected and the observed effectiveness of the Emergency Brake Assist (EBA) in terms of reduction in injury accidents in France. The evaluation of the expected effectiveness of EBA is based on the simulation of the reduction in injuries in non-EBA cars which could result in lower collision speeds resulting themselves in higher mean deceleration, would EBA have been available and applied in those cars. A sample of fatal police reports, for which most of the vehicles involved in an accident, braking distance, collision speed and injuries outcome are available, is used for the simulation. The evaluation of the observed effectiveness of EBA follows a 3-steps process: (1) The identification, in the French National injury accident census, of accident-involved cars for which the determination of whether or not the car was fitted with EBA is possible. A sample of 917 cars involved in injury accidents that occurred from January 2000 to June ...
During the last 5 years, the number of cars fitted with side airbags has dramatically increased. ... more During the last 5 years, the number of cars fitted with side airbags has dramatically increased. They are now standard equipment, even on many smaller cars or less luxurious vehicles. While some side airbags offer thoracic protection alone, there are those that combine thoracic and head protection (of which most deploy from the seat). Other systems employ separate airbags for head and thorax protection, which are designed to be effective noticeably in a crash against a pole. This paper proposes an evaluation of the effectiveness of side airbags in preventing thoracic injuries to passenger car occupants involved in side crashes. First, the target population (who can take benefit of side airbag deployment and in what circumstances) is defined. Side airbags can be especially effective in cases of impacts on the door with intrusion at a certain impact speed. Then, an example case of a side impact with side airbag deployment is given were side airbag deployment is thought to have had a p...
The evaluation of the road safety actions' effectiveness is one of the main activities carrie... more The evaluation of the road safety actions' effectiveness is one of the main activities carried out in road safety research departments. Safety actions refer to security measures such as regulations and recommendations for the policy level, security system for car manufacturers. Each safety action follows a detailed set of functional specifications. The evaluation is the process of assessing the designed actions against these specifications. By its ability to create new knowledge, the evaluation is also used to improve these actions to better anticipate new needs. Given the complexity of the evaluation activity and its context, the existing knowledge is insufficient. This situation reflects the lack of a theoretical framework. In particular, there is no way to identify emerging assessment issues due to the insertion of new security systems and the emergence of new users' behaviors. This paper deals with the construction of a theoretical framework that to be used as a guide fo...
In this paper, the authors discuss the potential influence that non- driving tasks have on driver... more In this paper, the authors discuss the potential influence that non- driving tasks have on driver performance and on the increased potential for accidents. They first look at the concepts of a driving function model, driver secondary task, driver use of cellular phones and methods for enhancing driver communication systems. They then discuss results from real crash analyses and accident simulations in France. Conclusions are made regarding critical task and driver functional failures, car driver inactivation, and secondary non- driving tasks related to car equipment.
One of the main objectives of the European TRACE project (Traffic Accident Causation in Europe, J... more One of the main objectives of the European TRACE project (Traffic Accident Causation in Europe, January 2006 – June 2008) was the development of methodology for the evaluation of the safety benefit of existing on-board safety applications in passenger cars with the use of mass accident data-bases only. The challenge was to evaluate passive safety applications as well as active applications and especially combinations of the two within a single investigation. In order to do so the well known concept of odds-ratio has been generalized for jointly evaluating injury mitigating effectiveness as well as accident avoiding effectiveness at once. This paper describes statistical sound methodology that is able to evaluate the safety benefit of either a single on-board safety function or the additional gain of specific safety feature(s) (i.e. a selection of various passive safety functions and active safety functions), given that some other safety applications already are on board. In particul...
The Integrated Safety programme and the eSafety initiative stress that the development of Intelli... more The Integrated Safety programme and the eSafety initiative stress that the development of Intelligent Transport Systems in vehicles or on roads (and especially in the safety field) must be preceded and accompanied by a scientific accident analysis encompassing two main issues: (1) The determination and the continuous up-dating of the etiology, i.e. causes, of road accidents (as well as the causes of injuries) and the assessment of whether the existing technologies or the technologies under current development address the real needs of road users inferred from accident and driver behavior analyses. (2) The identification and the assessment (in terms of lives saved, injuries mitigation and accidents avoided), among possible safety technologies, of the most promising solutions that can assist the driver or any other road users in a normal road situation or in an emergency situation or, as a last resort, mitigate the violence of crashes and protect vehicle occupants, pedestrians, and tw...
According to international and French national accident statistics, lane departures represent a h... more According to international and French national accident statistics, lane departures represent a high proportion of road crashes and casualties (potentially in excess of 40% of injury crashes and 70% of fatalities in France). It is therefore highly interesting to look at this type of accident in order to infer suitable countermeasures. This research examined non-voluntary lane departures in order to devise effective countermeasures for instances when they occur.
European official data from the European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO, www.erso.com) shows that ... more European official data from the European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO, www.erso.com) shows that Road traffic accidents in 2004 in the Member States of the European Union lead to about 47.000 fatalities and more than 1.8 million people injured. Coming back to the data in France provided by ONISR (Observatoire National Interministeriel de la Securite Routiere) in 2004, 5232 fatalities and 17435 seriously injured people have been observed. 3186 persons died in passenger cars. Frontal impacts represent 47% of killed and 69% of seriously injured people in passenger cars. The distribution is 1290 fatalities in front seats and 143 fatalities in rear seats. Recent progress in passive safety, coming from both regulation enforcement and consumers ratings allowed to solve most of the lethal issues in frontal impact which were: (1) Intrusion (steering wheel, firewall, footwell,…), which decreased with well-designed absorbing structure; (2) Head contact with steering wheel, avoided with frontal...
Working Group 21, Accident Studies, has been formed to bring together analysis of existing accide... more Working Group 21, Accident Studies, has been formed to bring together analysis of existing accident data in support of the work programme of the EEVC. Its members represent all of the major in-depth accident databases in Europe and have access to a large number of others. This paper presents some of its early work. A major task has been to conduct an audit of the available accident databases and to record their key characteristics. A total of 45 accident databases from 8 countries are identified and the paper lists factors including proprietary, data content, selection criteria, vehicles studied and purpose of investigation. In general larger quantities of accident data are more likely to give statistically significant results and a second objective of the group has been to evaluate the feasibility and analysis potential of combining data from several countries. A pilot study was conducted to combine data from France, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) to estimate the effectiveness...
In the course of the European Project TRACE (Traffic Accident Causation in Europe) an attempt was... more In the course of the European Project TRACE (Traffic Accident Causation in Europe) an attempt was made to analyse the cause of road traffic accidents from a factors' point of view. By literature review the most important independent risk factors for traffic accidents were identified to be speed, alcohol intake, male gender, young age, cell phone use, and fatigue. However, the impact of an accident related factor also depends on its prevalence in traffic and accidents, respectively. Available to the partners in the TRACE Project were different accident databases. Causally contributing factors found by accident investigations that are most often coded in accident databases are connected to unadapted speed and inattention. Taking into account the risk increase and the frequency of contribution to accidents the conclusion can be drawn that the most relevant factors for accident causation are: "alcohol", "speed", and "inattention and distraction.
In recent years, throughout Europe, truck manufacturers have developed and installed occupant res... more In recent years, throughout Europe, truck manufacturers have developed and installed occupant restraint systems similar to those that have been available in passenger vehicles for a long time. The development of truck seatbelts and steering-wheel mounted airbags is based on occupant safety research, and the need to meet European safety regulations which will come into effect in the near future. This paper aims to evaluate the potential efficiency of a seat belt coupled to an airbag. The study is based on the CEESAR truck accidents database. The sample includes 403 accidents which involved 479 unbelted occupants (all injury level). The injury causation mechanism according to the type and the severity of the crash enable us an effectiveness evaluation based on a supposed 100% seat belt (and air bag) use rate. The use of seat belts with 3 anchoring points mounted on the seat of trucks (with an airbag) would be effective for 37% of fatalities, 36% of seriously injured and 22% of slightl...
The assessment of real-world effectiveness of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is gainin... more The assessment of real-world effectiveness of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is gaining importance as more and more systems enter the market. Many different approaches have been developed. Therefore, the automobile industry, universities, and automotive research institutes in Europe have started an initiative for cooperative research. A ‘Harmonization Group’ was established in 2012 whose motivation is the development of a comprehensive, reliable, transparent, and thus accepted methodology for quantitative assessment of these systems by virtual simulation. The harmonization group focuses on prospective analysis, which has the objective to estimate the expected safety benefits of current and beyond-state-of-the-art applications. Commonly used methods for prospective analyses are FOT's, subject studies in driving simulators, on closed test tracks or on open roads, and virtual analyses by means of simulation. Currently, the basis for an assessment by virtual simulation ca...
Up to now quite a few electronic safety functions have been developed in order to successfully in... more Up to now quite a few electronic safety functions have been developed in order to successfully increase the safety of passenger in vehicles. Among them are electronic stability control (ESC), brake assists (BAS), lane departure warning systems (LDW) and so on. There exists a short literature on the quantification of the effectiveness of such safety systems on injury outcome or crash severity. As an example the ESC in several studies impressively has been shown to be efficient in avoiding a considerable amount of loss of control or skidding accidents. Nowadays many recently registered vehicles are equipped not only with one but instead with a number of safety functions (so- called safety equipment). The present paper proposes sound statistical methodology in order to investigate the safety benefit of such composite safety equipments (in contrast to a single safety function) in passenger vehicles. It seems obvious that the effectiveness of a specific safety equipment not simply is the...
Volume 2: 31st Design Automation Conference, Parts A and B, 2005
ABSTRACT Road Safety System development is complex task, which requires the collaboration between... more ABSTRACT Road Safety System development is complex task, which requires the collaboration between designers and accidentologists. However, designers and accidentologists do not share the same viewpoints, neither the same models to analyze an accident, nor the same technical language. This makes their communication a complex task in a design process. Accident Scenario is recognized as a powerful communication tool between designers and accidentologists. Nevertheless, an accident scenario has to be presented in a way that both designers and accidentologists can understand and use. To address this issue, we use the systemic approach (a complex system modeling approach) to develop a new methodology allowing constructing multi-view accident scenarios.
This study set out to evaluate the effectiveness of low speed autonomous emergency braking (AEB) ... more This study set out to evaluate the effectiveness of low speed autonomous emergency braking (AEB) technology in current model passenger vehicles, based on real-world crash experience. The validating vehicle safety through meta-analysis (VVSMA) group comprising a collaboration of government, industry consumer organisations and researchers, pooled data from a number of countries using a standard analysis format and the established MUND approach. Induced exposure methods were adopted to control for any extraneous effects. The findings showed a 38 percent overall reduction in rear-end crashes for vehicles fitted with AEB compared to a comparison sample of similar vehicles. There was no statistical evidence of any difference in effect between urban (≤60km/h) and rural (>60km/h) speed zones. Areas requiring further research were identified and widespread fitment through the vehicle fleet is recommended.
This paper proposes to estimate and to compare the expected and the observed effectiveness of the... more This paper proposes to estimate and to compare the expected and the observed effectiveness of the Emergency Brake Assist (EBA) in terms of reduction in injury accidents in France. The evaluation of the expected effectiveness of EBA is based on the simulation of the reduction in injuries in non-EBA cars which could result in lower collision speeds resulting themselves in higher mean deceleration, would EBA have been available and applied in those cars. A sample of fatal police reports, for which most of the vehicles involved in an accident, braking distance, collision speed and injuries outcome are available, is used for the simulation. The evaluation of the observed effectiveness of EBA follows a 3-steps process: (1) The identification, in the French National injury accident census, of accident-involved cars for which the determination of whether or not the car was fitted with EBA is possible. A sample of 917 cars involved in injury accidents that occurred from January 2000 to June ...
During the last 5 years, the number of cars fitted with side airbags has dramatically increased. ... more During the last 5 years, the number of cars fitted with side airbags has dramatically increased. They are now standard equipment, even on many smaller cars or less luxurious vehicles. While some side airbags offer thoracic protection alone, there are those that combine thoracic and head protection (of which most deploy from the seat). Other systems employ separate airbags for head and thorax protection, which are designed to be effective noticeably in a crash against a pole. This paper proposes an evaluation of the effectiveness of side airbags in preventing thoracic injuries to passenger car occupants involved in side crashes. First, the target population (who can take benefit of side airbag deployment and in what circumstances) is defined. Side airbags can be especially effective in cases of impacts on the door with intrusion at a certain impact speed. Then, an example case of a side impact with side airbag deployment is given were side airbag deployment is thought to have had a p...
The evaluation of the road safety actions' effectiveness is one of the main activities carrie... more The evaluation of the road safety actions' effectiveness is one of the main activities carried out in road safety research departments. Safety actions refer to security measures such as regulations and recommendations for the policy level, security system for car manufacturers. Each safety action follows a detailed set of functional specifications. The evaluation is the process of assessing the designed actions against these specifications. By its ability to create new knowledge, the evaluation is also used to improve these actions to better anticipate new needs. Given the complexity of the evaluation activity and its context, the existing knowledge is insufficient. This situation reflects the lack of a theoretical framework. In particular, there is no way to identify emerging assessment issues due to the insertion of new security systems and the emergence of new users' behaviors. This paper deals with the construction of a theoretical framework that to be used as a guide fo...
In this paper, the authors discuss the potential influence that non- driving tasks have on driver... more In this paper, the authors discuss the potential influence that non- driving tasks have on driver performance and on the increased potential for accidents. They first look at the concepts of a driving function model, driver secondary task, driver use of cellular phones and methods for enhancing driver communication systems. They then discuss results from real crash analyses and accident simulations in France. Conclusions are made regarding critical task and driver functional failures, car driver inactivation, and secondary non- driving tasks related to car equipment.
One of the main objectives of the European TRACE project (Traffic Accident Causation in Europe, J... more One of the main objectives of the European TRACE project (Traffic Accident Causation in Europe, January 2006 – June 2008) was the development of methodology for the evaluation of the safety benefit of existing on-board safety applications in passenger cars with the use of mass accident data-bases only. The challenge was to evaluate passive safety applications as well as active applications and especially combinations of the two within a single investigation. In order to do so the well known concept of odds-ratio has been generalized for jointly evaluating injury mitigating effectiveness as well as accident avoiding effectiveness at once. This paper describes statistical sound methodology that is able to evaluate the safety benefit of either a single on-board safety function or the additional gain of specific safety feature(s) (i.e. a selection of various passive safety functions and active safety functions), given that some other safety applications already are on board. In particul...
The Integrated Safety programme and the eSafety initiative stress that the development of Intelli... more The Integrated Safety programme and the eSafety initiative stress that the development of Intelligent Transport Systems in vehicles or on roads (and especially in the safety field) must be preceded and accompanied by a scientific accident analysis encompassing two main issues: (1) The determination and the continuous up-dating of the etiology, i.e. causes, of road accidents (as well as the causes of injuries) and the assessment of whether the existing technologies or the technologies under current development address the real needs of road users inferred from accident and driver behavior analyses. (2) The identification and the assessment (in terms of lives saved, injuries mitigation and accidents avoided), among possible safety technologies, of the most promising solutions that can assist the driver or any other road users in a normal road situation or in an emergency situation or, as a last resort, mitigate the violence of crashes and protect vehicle occupants, pedestrians, and tw...
According to international and French national accident statistics, lane departures represent a h... more According to international and French national accident statistics, lane departures represent a high proportion of road crashes and casualties (potentially in excess of 40% of injury crashes and 70% of fatalities in France). It is therefore highly interesting to look at this type of accident in order to infer suitable countermeasures. This research examined non-voluntary lane departures in order to devise effective countermeasures for instances when they occur.
European official data from the European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO, www.erso.com) shows that ... more European official data from the European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO, www.erso.com) shows that Road traffic accidents in 2004 in the Member States of the European Union lead to about 47.000 fatalities and more than 1.8 million people injured. Coming back to the data in France provided by ONISR (Observatoire National Interministeriel de la Securite Routiere) in 2004, 5232 fatalities and 17435 seriously injured people have been observed. 3186 persons died in passenger cars. Frontal impacts represent 47% of killed and 69% of seriously injured people in passenger cars. The distribution is 1290 fatalities in front seats and 143 fatalities in rear seats. Recent progress in passive safety, coming from both regulation enforcement and consumers ratings allowed to solve most of the lethal issues in frontal impact which were: (1) Intrusion (steering wheel, firewall, footwell,…), which decreased with well-designed absorbing structure; (2) Head contact with steering wheel, avoided with frontal...
Working Group 21, Accident Studies, has been formed to bring together analysis of existing accide... more Working Group 21, Accident Studies, has been formed to bring together analysis of existing accident data in support of the work programme of the EEVC. Its members represent all of the major in-depth accident databases in Europe and have access to a large number of others. This paper presents some of its early work. A major task has been to conduct an audit of the available accident databases and to record their key characteristics. A total of 45 accident databases from 8 countries are identified and the paper lists factors including proprietary, data content, selection criteria, vehicles studied and purpose of investigation. In general larger quantities of accident data are more likely to give statistically significant results and a second objective of the group has been to evaluate the feasibility and analysis potential of combining data from several countries. A pilot study was conducted to combine data from France, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) to estimate the effectiveness...
In the course of the European Project TRACE (Traffic Accident Causation in Europe) an attempt was... more In the course of the European Project TRACE (Traffic Accident Causation in Europe) an attempt was made to analyse the cause of road traffic accidents from a factors' point of view. By literature review the most important independent risk factors for traffic accidents were identified to be speed, alcohol intake, male gender, young age, cell phone use, and fatigue. However, the impact of an accident related factor also depends on its prevalence in traffic and accidents, respectively. Available to the partners in the TRACE Project were different accident databases. Causally contributing factors found by accident investigations that are most often coded in accident databases are connected to unadapted speed and inattention. Taking into account the risk increase and the frequency of contribution to accidents the conclusion can be drawn that the most relevant factors for accident causation are: "alcohol", "speed", and "inattention and distraction.
In recent years, throughout Europe, truck manufacturers have developed and installed occupant res... more In recent years, throughout Europe, truck manufacturers have developed and installed occupant restraint systems similar to those that have been available in passenger vehicles for a long time. The development of truck seatbelts and steering-wheel mounted airbags is based on occupant safety research, and the need to meet European safety regulations which will come into effect in the near future. This paper aims to evaluate the potential efficiency of a seat belt coupled to an airbag. The study is based on the CEESAR truck accidents database. The sample includes 403 accidents which involved 479 unbelted occupants (all injury level). The injury causation mechanism according to the type and the severity of the crash enable us an effectiveness evaluation based on a supposed 100% seat belt (and air bag) use rate. The use of seat belts with 3 anchoring points mounted on the seat of trucks (with an airbag) would be effective for 37% of fatalities, 36% of seriously injured and 22% of slightl...
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