Secondary, or passive, safety includes the most important strategies to reduce the traffic trauma problem. This field concerns the protection of road users when an accident takes place. The current European R&D needs in this field are partially dealt with in a large European co-operative R&D project Advanced Protection Systems (APROSYS, , http://www.aprosys.com/) supported by the European Commission under contract number TIP3-CT-2004-506503. The general objective ofAPROSYS is the development and introduction of critical technologies thatimprove passive safety for all European road users in the relevant accident types and for the important severities. An important aspect in APROSYS is the integrated approach with primary, or active, safety, the so-called area of integrated safety. In this introduction paper of this special International Journal of Crashworthiness issue, an overview of the project is presented emphasising its ten main achievements. (Author/publisher)
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