Prospective Effectiveness Assessment of Adas and Active Safety Systems via Virtual Simulation: a Review of the Current Practices

The automobile industry, universities, and automotive research institutes in Europe have started an initiative for cooperative research regarding assessment of real-world safety benefits of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and active safety systems. A ‘Harmonization Group’ was established in 2012 whose motivation is the development of a comprehensive, reliable, transparent, and thus accepted methodology for quantitative assessment of these systems by virtual numerical simulation. One aim of this group, so-called P.E.A.R.S. (Prospective Effectiveness Assessment for Road Safety), was to provide a review of the current practices for this prospective effectiveness assessment of ADAS and active safety systems. This paper’s objective is to present this review. As a complement to a literature review, five workshops were held with a dozen of P.E.A.R.S. members to collect qualitative in-depth information about their approaches concerning the effectiveness evaluation of ADAS and active safety systems via simulation. During the workshops, non-directive interviews and discussions were held to gather information on the research questions, metrics, methods and simulation techniques employed by the P.E.A.R.S. members. Subsequently, the approaches for prospective effectiveness assessment were classified into four levels according to their use of simulation. Finally, criteria for evaluating the approaches were identified. The overall evaluation approach consists of: 1) identifying the target accident situations (TS) that the system could potentially address (usually by using crash databases), for example pedestrian crashes; 2) establishing, for each TS, reference situations (RS) such as driving, pre-crash or crash situations in which the system was not present, for example all configurations of pedestrian crashes or critical situations involving a vehicle and a pedestrian; 3) adding the system to the reference situations in order to establish what would have happened if the system had been present,