Policy decisions over the relative benefits and costs of different casualty reduction methods rely on comparable estimates of injury and casualty reductions in the crash population. Pendant Task 1.3 will develop and validate a harmonised analytic procedure that has general applicability to both injury and accident causation countermeasures. The methods will utilise the data collected in WP 2 and WP 3 as well as available accident data to predict casualty reductions for the EU based on the prevailing accident and injury distributions. The methods will include engineering assessment of the effectiveness of the technologies under well defined conditions which will then be expanded to the full range of crash circumstances seen in the real world. In this report the influence of engineering countermeasures and in particular improved restraint systems will be investigated using a general simplified multi-body car model for the collision phase which will be used to predict the acceleration, deformation and intrusion behaviour of the involved cars during a real world accident. The validation of these models will be based on available crash test data of comparable Euro NCAP tests. The validated model is used to simulate a real world accident and to predict the injuries and/or the effect of engineering countermeasures like improved restraint systems on the injury risk of the occupants. (Author/publisher)
Abstract