Developing Active and Integrated Safety Systems – An Innovative Method

Developing active and integrated safety systems is a complicated and time-consuming activity. The system performance depends on different factors such as the traffic environment, the vehicle state, and the driver behavior. Complexity in scenarios makes it difficult to determine the systems’ robustness and fail safety. Another challenge is the fact that more and more vehicle safety systems operate in the zero time-to-collision (0TTC) range. In order to cope with these challenges, TNO has created an innovative methodology for design and assessment of active and integrated safety systems. The key-points of the methodology are that: 1. It converts real-world accident data into effective system designs 2. It considers active and passive system elements simultaneously 3. It is based on seamless integration of software tools and test facilities 4. Experimental results are used to validate the simulations This paper gives a description of the methodology as well as of the tools that are used within the methodology. The descriptions are illustrated by examples from use-cases.