This report allows us to make the link between WP5 and WP2. Several models of accident causation exist in road accident research. The objective of this report is to make an inventory of these models and to identify their basis of formulation. This report is based upon a review of literature and/or previous projects such as the models developed within SafetyNet and TRACE. A lot is known about accidentology since researchers have been working in this area for several decades, both in the areas of accident causation and in passive safety. The basic method applied in accidentology (and especially in micro accidentology) is that the accident is studied in its chronology: The driving phase, which is, for the driver, a normal situation with no unexpected demands upon him. The rupture phase, that occurs when an unexpected event (or so-called precipitating event) turns the driving situation into an accident situation for which, suddenly, the demand to the driver exceeds his normal or acceptable ability to respond. The emergency phase, which covers the space and time between rupture and collision. And finally, the crash phase (e.g. impact, collision or roll over). There are also many ways to analyse accidents and accident mechanisms. For example, LAB (F) developed its own accident analysis model in order to understand the production of the accidental situation. This model was inspired by previous work and especially those carried out by INRETS (F) at the beginning of the nineteen eighties in the south of France and identifies: * The sequential description of the accident circumstances, * The events that could have contributed to convert a driving situation into an accident situation, * The nature of the driver functional failure (e.g. perception, comprehension, decision, action) and the mechanism of the human failure (e.g. driving errors, unavailability of information, under-activation to driving), * An identification of manoeuvres carried out by the drivers and the trajectories of the vehicles. * And finally the sequential correspondence between car kinematics parameters and human cognitive parameters, from the initial conflict situation to the impact. This is the final step of the accident analysis: its reconstruction. The use of such a model has already produced interesting results. For example, INRETS has examined French in-depth accident data and has proposed to set a classification of accidents based on the production of human failure. The fundamental idea of this approach is to consider the human error not as a cause of the accident but rather as a consequence of malfunctions occurring in the interactions between the driver and his environment. Some causes of the error are considered to be internal to the driver whereas other causes are considered to be external. In this research, the error is exclusively studied, just before the accident situation, from the driver perspective. It could actually be argued that part of the cause of an accident could be nested within the organisation of traffic, production of vehicles, individual proneness to be involved in accidents, economical context, urban management, or other complex multi-factorial factors. This report makes an inventory of existing accident causation models published in scientific literature. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting