Development and Application of an Integrated Evaluation Framework for Preventive Safety Applications

Preventive safety functions help drivers avoid or mitigate accidents. No quantitative methods have been available to evaluate the safety impact of these systems. This paper describes a framework for the assessment of preventive and active safety functions, which integrates procedures for technical performance, human factors, and safety assessments in one holistic approach. The concept of situational control , which is defined as the degree of control that a joint driver-vehicle system exerts over a traffic situation, has been introduced. Assessment involves technical evaluation , which assesses that the system and all subsystems work according to the functional and technical specifications, human factors evaluation, which assesses the behavioral situational control parameters, and safety potential evaluation, which performs a detailed assessment of internal and external impact mechanisms that change the situational control at the traffic level. The methodology has been applied to the INSAFES project, which integrates lateral and longitudinal control functions.