VEDYAC stands for VEhicle DYnamics And Crash, a computer program which is able to compute and display movements of bodies in space and what happens when they collide. The SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research uses VEDYAC mainly to simulate collisions between cars and roadside structures, like lamp standards, safety barriers and other street furniture, with the aim to test the design of the structures for safety. Until now, VEDYAC was only capable of simulating collisions on straight road segments, because vehicles in the model could not steer. Vehicles could only be given an initial speed in an initial direction, but during the simulation one had not control over the vehicle. This report describes how VEDYAC works and what modifications were made to it in order to implement steering. Chapter 2 gives a quick overview of the physics which is needed to understand the computations in VEDYAC. Chapter 3 explains how objects are modelled in VEDYAC. Chapter 4 describes how VEDYAC computes the forces acting on objects and how the motions of the objects are computed. Chapter 5 describes how the steering was implemented. Chapter 6 describes a simulation which was done with the new steering algorithm. Finally, in Chapter 7 some conclusions are drawn and recommendations for improvement of VEDYAC is given. (A)
Abstract