Abstract
Keywords: secondary safety, passive safety, advanced protection systems, human biomechanics, European cooperation, vehicle and infrastructure crashworthiness
Secondary (or passive) safety constitutes one of the most important strategies to reduce the traffic trauma problem. The European R&D needs in this field are partially dealt with in a large European co-operative R&D project called APROSYS (Advanced Protection Systems) supported by the European Commission. The general objective of APROSYS is the development and introduction of critical technologies that improve passive safety for all European road users in all relevant accident types and accident severity's. The accident types include accidents amongst cars, pedestrians, Heavy Vehicles and (motor) cyclists. The most important objectives and outputs are (1) development of new injury criteria and injury tolerance, (2) development of new mathematical models of the human body (crash & precrash phase, arbitrary body sizes), (3) development of a new world-wide harmonized crash dummy for representation of a small female car occupant (side impact), (4) development of knowledge and tools enabling the design, implementation and evaluation of intelligent safety systems, (5) enhancement of virtual testing technology for design and evaluation of crash protection methods and (6) development of test methods and advanced protection systems for injury reduction in most relevant accident types involving car occupants, motorcyclists, pedestrians and cyclist. In doing so, APROSYS addresses the problem in two ways. First design requirements for various safety systems will be proposed, while on the other hand new design concepts are development. Furthermore, a large step is made on the testing and evaluation of advanced, active safety systems. Currently existing regulations are combined with new test procedures and virtual testing to enable assessment of future crash and pre-crash safety devices. The APROSYS project has 50 partners including a number of OEM's and runs from April 2004 till March 2009. An important aspect in APROSYS is the integrated approach of primary (or active) safety and secondary safety, the so-called area of integrated safety. In this paper an overview of the project will be presented as well as some of its main a chievements.