Abstract
Active safety systems are massively implemented into new vehicle genera-tions and offer a high potential in decreasing road accidents. While testing and rating of pas-sive vehicle safety are based on established and accepted methods and programmes, no such are available for active vehicle safety today. Thus it is difficult to assess the performance of those systems for industry, legislation and further stakeholders. In particular, the end cus-tomer cannot judge about active safety of different vehicles based on easy-to-understand rat-ings as they are offered by different NCAP programmes. This leads to a relatively low aware-ness of active safety systems and can hinder a higher market penetration.
The main focus of the European research project "Testing and Evaluation Methods for ICT-based Safety Systems (eVALUE)" is to define objective methods for the assessment of active safety systems. These methods are based on relevant traffic scenarios that, according to inves-tigated statistics and databases, represent the majority of accidents, where active safety sys-tems can come into effect.
Based on these scenarios, draft test methods have been developed and lately compiled as test protocols. Intensive physical testing and application of the draft test protocols is performed in order to validate and improve the methods proposed by the consortium. Another important topic are indicators which show potential to assess the safety benefit of different active safety functions. Here, a major challenge is given by the lack of required input data, i.e. detailed ac-cident statistics for Europe. A first set of indicators has been identified and will be validated. However, it can already be stated today that additional research beyond the scope of the eVALUE project will be required.
This new and highly needed test programme will allow first assessment of potential of the overall safety performance of a vehicle with respect to active safety systems. However, the eVALUE consortium will only define the test methods while the thresholds for the specific values are not specified. This remains the competence of every institution adopting the test methods and actually applying them in order to assess different vehicles. The later results of the programme will increase the public awareness for active safety systems and foster the de-velopment within the industry.
This paper focuses on the latest results regarding testing and evaluation methods for safety systems of the longitudinal and lateral assistance domains. A second paper (F2010-C-176) is covering details of the vehicle stability domain with its special requirements.
Keywords: Active safety, Test programme, Safety assessment, Longitudinal assistance, Lateral assistance