The ASSESS project is a European Commission co-funded project that aimed to develop harmonized and standardized assessment procedures for collision mitigation and avoidance systems. ASSESS was one of the first European projects which dealt in depth with the concept of integrated safety, defining methodologies to analyse vehicle safety from a global point of view. As such, the developed procedures included driver behaviour evaluation, pre-crash and crash system performance evaluation and socio-economic assessment.
The activities performed for the crash evaluation focussed on the influence of braking manoeuvres in occupant positioning through dynamic braking manoeuvres with real occupants and Madymo and LS-Dyna simulations. The assessment of the passive safety protection level according to the results of the influence of the active systems is based on sled testing and full vehicle testing. This paper focusses on braking manoeuvres with volunteers and full vehicle tests for frontal offset deformable barrier impact configuration.
The results show the effects of the pre-crash systems activation on the crash course, i.e. changes to the impact speed in combination with changes of occupant positioning, both due to pre-braking. The effects are quantified using the dummy injury criteria obtained from offset deformable barrier crash tests. The effects of different pre-crash system elements were analysed separately by comparing the results for the tested scenarios.
As of today, there is no regulation, assessment program, or other similar official procedure in place for systematically assessing pre-crash systems during the crash phase. The presented work is a first step for an integrated evaluation comprising pre-crash and crash phases.