Wood, 1 SIMULATION OF DRIVER, VEHICLE AND ENVIRONMENTAL ASPECTS OF CRASH INITIATION, A NEW METHOD TO IMPROVE INTEGRATED SAFETY EFFECTIVENESS

New technologies are becoming available to reduce the frequency of crashes. They may be vehicle based or road based and will involve a variety of levels of information provision to drivers and increasing levels of control over the vehicle. Vehicle systems under development include Intelligent Speed Control, Lane keeping, Adaptive Cruise Control, night vision, driver drowsiness detection while road based systems include information services and signalling. Systems development is made on the basis of technological factors, experimental studies and human factors approaches. While improved safety is a prime objective of a number of these systems, there are currently few methods available to systematically assess the in-depth application of the technologies in specific accident situations. The paper reports on a new methodology for vehicle and traffic simulation that reproduces the drivers’ and vehicles’ actions in the period leading to a crash. Autonomous driver agents are used to simulate the observations, behaviour and decision making of the driver while vehicle dynamics modules and road modules place the driver within the traffic and road context. To enable virtual drivers to emulate some of the unpredictable behaviour of their human counterparts, each driver agent has the capability to perceive their environment, make decisions based on what they ‘see’ and take appropriate actions. So far, several aspects of the model have been validated against experimentally derived data. The model has been used to simulate the pre-crash events leading to cases examined within the UK On-the-Spot Accident study. Case studies are presented and other applications of the simulation methodology relating to driving simulators, virtual road design and other transport applications will also be discussed. The oral presentation will include video run throughs of real-world scenarios and their simulations. INTRODUCTION Each year there are over 40,000 traffic fatalities on the roads of the 15 member states of the EU, when under-reporting is taken into account the numbers of injured exceed 3,500,000. The costs to society are immense, quite apart from the pain and suffering the economic penalty to the EU is 166,000,000,000 Euros, exceeding the annual budget of the European Commission (ETSC, 2001). The importance of reducing the impact of road crashes is increasingly widely recognised and the European Commission has adopted a target of a 50% reduction in fatalities by 2010. This ambitious target is being addressed at national and European levels by a variety of methods including improvements in vehicle safety, road infrastructure design, and road user behaviour. In particular active safety technologies are being developed that may have the potential to provide further crash reductions although there is much development needed (ETSC, 2001), (Sferco et al., 2001), (Noy, 2001), (Najim et al., 2001), (Carsten and Tate, 2001). These systems will be simple in operation in the early stages, providing driver support under relatively straightforward driving conditions. Despite this they may be complex technically due to the demanding nature of the traffic, vehicle and road user system within which they must operate. New technical objectives are identified through the use of both national level and in-depth accident data that can give relatively unambiguous descriptions of the circumstances of accidents and the nature and causation of injuries. Typically an understanding of the events before and during a crash is gained by the use of detailed reconstruction techniques that use physical evidence from the scene and vehicles to simulate the vehicle movements and final rest positions of the crash participants. Nevertheless, although these methods are capable of providing an accurate picture of the events of the crash they do not explain the reasons for those movements, neither do they offer much potential for evaluating accident risk should any factors contributing to the crash be changed.