Contact

Dipl.-Ing. Micha Lesemann

lesemann@ika.rwth-aachen.de
Phone: +49 241 80 27535

Institut fr Kraftfahrzeuge
RWTH Aachen University
Steinbachstr. 7
52074 Aachen, Germany

eVALUE TESTING AND EVALUATION METHODS FOR ACTIVE VEHICLE SAFETY

Modern society strongly depends on mobility and the need for
transport of both people and goods is expected to grow further
in the future. Besides clearly positive impacts, mobility and
especially road transport cause major societal problems such
as accidents, pollution and congestions. To counter these negative aspects of increasing mobility, the European Commission is supporting numerous
research projects with the aim to develop cleaner, safer and more efficient vehicles.

Active Safety

Passive Safety

Hazard Prevention
Hazard Detection

Damage Reduction

Hazard Avoidance

Hazard Mitigation

Crash

Crash

unavoidable

Time
ACC

ABS

CM

Adaptive Cruise Control

AntiBrake System

Collision Mitigation

LDW

ESC

Lane Departure Warning

Electronic Stability Control

LKA
Lane Keeping Assist

FCW

Adaptive Headrest
PreCrash

Forward Collision Warning

BSD
Blind Spot Detection

Fig. 1:

Seatbelts
Airbags
Collapsing Steering
Collapsing Pedals
NCAP programs

Safety functions addressed by eVALUE

Preventive (or active) safety functions are playing a bigger role regarding vehicle safety nowadays and contribute to the mitigation or avoidance of accidents to a large extent (Fig. 1). A
large number of these safety functions are already available for upper and middle class
vehicles today. Besides developing existing functions further and introducing new functions it
is important to increase public perception and acceptance for these preventive safety functions. Therefore it is necessary to clearly show the advantages and benefit in an objective
and easy-to-understand manner to the customers. One key part of this assessment of active
safety functions are standardised test and evaluation methods. The development and definition of these methods is the aim of the research project eVALUE, which is supported by the
European Commission and coordinated by ika.

While testing and rating of the passive safety of vehicles are based on established and
accepted methods and programmes, no such are available today for active safety of cars or
trucks. Thus it is difficult to assess the performance of those functions for the average car
buyer. In addition, no platform is available for the communication of test results. This is a
large difference compared to passive safety where standardised test programs such as
Euro NCAP exist and lead to a significant increase of public perception over the last years.
As for Euro NCAP, a star rating has been established that allows customers to easily compare the passive safety of different vehicles. At the same time, detailed results are available
for R&D experts of vehicles.
Within the eVALUE project, a basis for objective assessment of active vehicle safety is built.
Different functions that are available on the market today are into three different domains:
longitudinal functionalities, lateral functionalities and stability-related functionalities. The
assessment of the capabilities within these domains is based on relevant traffic scenarios,
which cover the majority of critical driving situations, Fig. 2. By means of these scenarios,
explicit tests are developed that allow analysing the reactions of a vehicle as such and
accordingly the assessment with regard to different safety indicators. While objective testing
methods are developed within the project, the fail or pass criteria will not be defined by the
project partners.

Subject vehicle

R
Low

vt

vs

High
vs

amax

vs

amax

Target vehicle
Low

High

vs

Fig. 1:

Examples of regarded scenarios

The project is supported by the European Commission and has a total budget of 3.8 million
euro. The duration is three years from the start in January 2008. Further project partners are:
Centro Ricerche FIAT (Italy), Volvo Technology Corporation (Sweden), Ibeo Automobile
Sensor GmbH (Germany), SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden (Sweden), VTI
Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (Sweden), Robotiker Tecnalia
(Spain), and IDIADA Automotive Technology SA (Spain).
Further information is available from the project web-site: www.evalue-project.eu

reference: gb2-26e_evalue.docx

date: 12-07-2010