F2008-08-156
Multivariate Benefit Estimation of Future Vehicle Safety Systems
Over the last decades the number of traffic accident fatalities on German roads decreased by 76% down to 5091 in the year 2006. This positive decrease is based on an optimization of vehicle safety, road and infrastructure and medical rescue issues. Up to now mostly the optimizations of secondary safety measures are leading to this effect on vehicle safety. Since some years more and more driver assistance systems are available and leading to a further reduction of all accidents. These new systems are often comfort systems and have not been developed to increase vehicle safety. In opposite to secondary safety systems primary safety systems are able to mitigate and avoid accidents. So in the future it is important to estimate the benefit of these systems in reducing accident numbers as well. Current benefit estimation methods mostly focus on a single system only and not on the combination of systems. In this paper a new method for a multivariate benefit estimation based on real accident data is developed. The paper describes the principle method to estimate the benefit of primary and secondary safety systems in combination. With the presented method the benefit will not be overestimated as it is by a simple addition of the benefits of single systems. The model will be validated by a multivariate prospective benefit estimation of different vehicle safety systems in comparison to single benefit estimations of the same systems. For this the German In-Depth Accident Database is used. The results show the importance to implement the interactions of safety systems in the estimation process and rate the overestimation by a simple addition of the single system benefits. The validation includes primary and secondary safety systems in combination. The validation is done using more than 3500 real accidents which were initiated by cars. This sample out of the GIDAS database is representative for the current accident situation in Germany. The paper shows the necessity of a multivariate estimation of the benefit for existing and future safety systems.
Session: Accident Analysis I