Special Issue on New Applications and Advanced Methodologies for Road Safety and Simulation

Safety and in particular road safety have become major concerns worldwide, due to the rapid growth in the number of vehicles and traffic accidents. Road fatalities are the result of several joint factors: they can be caused by drivers' errors, by vehicles' malfunctions and by issues related to roads environment. In the U.S., in 2010 there were an estimated 5.419.000 crashes (30.296 fatal crashes), killing 32.999 and injuring 2.239.000. The European Commission has defined road safety as the major societal issue: in 2011, more than 30,000 people died on the roads of the European Union, i.e. the equivalent of a medium town. In addition, for every death on Europe's roads there are an estimated 4 permanently disabling injuries such as damage to the brain or spinal cord, 8 serious injuries and 50 minor injuries. More recently, more than 180.000 road accidents were reported in Italy in the 2013 with 3.400 deaths and 259.500 injured. In order to enhance road safety, several researches have been recently carried out defining new strategies and approaches, exploiting new advanced methodologies. In particular, the technologies provided by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be helpful in tackling road safety issues. Through the technologies provided by ICT, it is possible to find new and innovative solutions to road safety issues, developing new systems and tools, which can improve the investigation and analyses of roads problems. Throughout the past years, a great deal of research efforts have centered on this field. Furthermore, the focus of recent researches is the development of methodologies, tools and technologies to design innovative methods and algorithms