Increasing road safety is a key societal challenge to reduce the number and severity of accidents on the road. One of the key aspects is to improve vehicle safety while taking into account the increasing number of road participants and transportation modes (e.g., electric scooters), the fast technology advances such as active safety systems and the increased amount of information available for occupant status monitoring and advanced driver assistance functions. AddSafety will help overcome road safety challenges to reach “Vision Zero”.

At present, vehicle safety systems are mainly tested under simplified laboratory conditions. As a result, the full range of crash configurations is usually not considered, which means that the effectiveness of vehicle safety systems is only evaluated in a subset of possible crash configurations. However, a much larger number of accident configurations would have to be considered for a comprehensive evaluation of the systems. An assessment based solely on physical testing this would inevitably lead to increased cost and effort. However, increasing the use of simulations is currently still associated with an increasing number of tests as trust in simulations alone is often limited.

The aim of the AddSafety project is to bring the evaluations of vehicle safety systems closer to real-world traffic conditions. It is intended to foster the use of simulations over a wide range of scenarios and considerably improve confidence in the simulation results due to improved hardware testing for calibration and validation of the simulation models. The smart combination of physical tests and simulations (“hybrid evaluation”) will enable the development of more robust safety systems. This should sustainably improve road safety, as these more robust safety systems will enable more reliable prevention and mitigation of accidents and injuries. The necessary tools and methods will be developed within the project and applied to selected systems. This will enable systems to be developed more efficiently and requiring less hardware tests. In addition, this hybrid assessment method would allow for a much larger number of scenarios to be considered and thus better reflect the real-world accident situation. However, these hybrid evaluations require simulation models with sufficient predictive capabilities, which will be developed in the project through enhanced calibration and validation testing methods. The AddSafety methods developed will be applied to industrial demonstrators (autonomous emergency braking systems detecting vulnerable road users and adaptive restraint systems considering seat adjustment and occupant characteristics beside information on the crash itself) throughout the project. A holistic assessment will be carried out to derive the overall efficiency increase from the developed methods and the overall safety improvement enabled from systems with a wider coverage of scenarios.
 

Obj.1: Holistic catalogue of real-world scenarios with related occurrence probabilities, derived from accident data and traffic observations.

Obj.2: Enhanced simulation models of active and passive vehicle safety measures as enabler
for robust, accurate and efficient development.

Obj.3: Minimize number of required hardware tests and increase coverage of scenarios with
efficient hybrid testing methods supported by smart design of experiment (DoE) using AI
and statistical models enabling fast exploration of the design space and identification of the
most beneficial physical testing load cases and projection of simulation results towards the
entire scenario catalogue.

Obj.4: Minimize uncertainties in hardware tests and quantify related benefit for the development process and increased trust in simulation models.

Obj.5: Demonstration of the AddSafety holistic methodology in industrial use cases illustrating the maturity of the methodology to address relevant industrial needs and the capability to upscale for different applications for both active and passive safety.

The AddSafety consortium provides a perfect complementarity in terms of competences, in terms of access to research infrastructure and proving grounds, and in terms of innovation and industrialization capability. Furthermore, the advisory board will be a strong vector to increase the outreach of the project.

Partners include car manufacturers, safety component suppliers, software suppliers, test equipment suppliers, testing partners and scientific partners.