Abstract
Keywords: assessment, evaluation, driver assistance systems, pedestrian protection
A few years ago vehicle safety was all about occupant protection. Huge efforts have been made in the last decades to increase road safety. Therefore, modern cars are unprecedently safe in terms of occupant safety. Vehicle compatibility to vulnerable road users had less priority. Consequently, there is still a great potential to save the lives of vulnerable road users and to minimize their injuries. During the last decade pedestrian and bicyclist safety discussion peaked at national and international levels. Efforts have been made to implement technical measures into the vehicle to increase pedestrian safety. This has led to European legislation concerning pedestrian safety and other vulnerable road users. Recently released legislation in the European Community and Japan is based on component test procedures which assess the vehicle front.
Active safety in general (infrastructural, educational, and technical measures) has increased, helping to keep the number of accidents nearly constant while traffic density has also been increasing. Against the background of the development of advanced driver assistant systems, the European pedestrian safety approach has to be adapted. These active safety systems might be able to sense an upcoming unavoidable collision prior to first contact and reduce its severity, or even avoid a crash by using advanced warning and driver assistance strategies. Although upcoming driver assistance systems definitely will have an impact on road safety, the prediction of their potential safety benefits often remained fuzzy. For legislation regarding advanced driver assistance systems, an evaluation and optimization is highly desirable. At the same time, in the development process of such systems, evaluation criteria are needed too.
The exact potential of combined active and passive safety measures for injury risk mitigation can be evaluated by the VERPS+ index which has been developed within this work. It can be shown, that passive and active pedestrian protection measures complement each other nearly ideally, while the injury mitigation potentials of structural measures remains limited and cannot address the secondary impact of the pedestrian on the road. Basically, advanced driver assistance systems prevent or mitigate accidents, thus minimizing pedestrian injury risks. To analyze their safety impact, driver data of braking behavior and valid simulation of vehicle dynamics have been set up and statistic analysis of accident prevention and mitigation potentials has been performed.