Applications in Traffic Accident Research to Improve Vehicle Safety

Over the past 15 years, the number of fatalities in road traffic in Germany decreased continuously from around 6800 to just under 3200. In the same period, the number of traffic accidents recorded by the police remained roughly constant. In addition to infrastructural changes, this is primarily a result of improved passive and active vehicle safety, to which traffic accident investigation and analyses have made a crucial contribution. Therefore, the Institute for Traffic Accident Research at Dresden University of Technology (VUFO) is investigating about 1000 traffic accidents per year as a part of the German In-Depth Accident Study (GIDAS) since 1999 and records critical situations in a Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS).

In order to continue this tendency and meet the increasing requirements from the development and assurance of future driver assistance systems to highly and fully automated driving, it is important to use statistical and simulative analysis methods efficiently and to develop and combine new approaches.

This talk presents applications in traffic accident research that use MATLAB^® and Simulink^® as well as appropriate toolboxes to improve vehicle safety and the assurance of highly automated driving.

This includes, among other things:

• Statistical accident analyses and mathematical models with Database Toolbox™ as well as Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox™
• Traffic accident simulation and creation of a pre-crash matrix (PCM) with MATLAB and Simulink (external solver)
• Effectiveness analyses and efficiency assessment of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) with MATLAB and Simulink
• Algorithm-based processing of real driving scenarios (NDS data) for simulative applications using Computer Vision System Toolbox™, Automated Driving System Toolbox™, Signal Processing Toolbox™, and Mapping Toolbox™