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The ASSESS project is a European Commission co-funded project that aimed to develop harmonized and standardized assessment procedures for collision mitigation and avoidance systems. ASSESS was one of the first European projects which dealt in depth with the concept of integrated safety, defining methodologies to analyse vehicle safety from a global point of view. As such, the developed procedures included driver behaviour evaluation, pre-crash and crash system performance evaluation and socio-economic assessment. The activities performed for the crash evaluation focussed on the influence of braking manoeuvres in occupant positioning through dynamic braking manoeuvres with real occupants and Madymo and LS-Dyna simulations. The assessment of the passive safety protection level according to the results of the influence of the active systems is based on sled testing and full vehicle testing.

Thoracic injuries are one of the main causes of fatalities and severe injuries in car crashes. The tools available today for studying these injuries are not up to par with the latest implementation of restraint systems and airbags. THORAX-FP7 is a collaborative medium scale project under the Seventh Framework. It focuses on the reduction and prevention of thoracic injuries through an improved understanding of the thoracic injury mechanisms and the implementation of this understanding in an updated design for the thorax-shoulder complex of the THOR dummy. The updated dummy should enable the design and evaluation of advanced restraint systems for a wide variety (gender, age and size) of car occupants.

It is generally accepted that the targets for fatality reduction in car accidents set by Governments in Europe, USA and Japan can only be met by using advanced technologies that will include a broad range of sensors to monitor the crash likelihood and severity, vehicle condition, occupant type and posture. Information provided by these sensors can be used to increase the effectiveness of restraint systems. On the basis of information on the vehicle and the occupant status during the crash event, restraint parameters such as belt force and airbag outflow could be controlled real-time in such a way that injury levels sustained by the occupants are minimized. Real-time control during the crash event enables restraint systems to adapt to real world conditions and offers improved performance in terms of injury reduction over a much broader range of impact scenarios.

Despite substantial efforts, no manufacturer can guarantee that vehicles by themselves will not rollover due to driver induced maneuvers. The complexity of rollover events makes the characterization of these accidents much more difficult than for planar crashes. For this reason, a combined numerical-experimental approach has been developed for the prediction of the vehicle dynamics in rollover conditions. Prediction of the vehicle dynamics in rollover conditions requires simulation models that have validity beyond the common vehicle dynamic motions. This numerical-experimental tool can be used for testing pre-empting rollover sensors and analysis of the vehicle rollover resistance.

On behalf of NHTSA and the Dutch Ministry of Traffic and Transport the Safety department of TNO Automotive is performing numerical fleet studies using multi-body models. Aim is to develop strategies for optimization of front-end structures minimizing the total harm in car-to-car crashes on a fleet-wide basis. For these studies multi-body models are being constructed from existing finite element models. Front-end structure and passenger cell are modeled in detail to provide realistic deformation modes. Furthermore dummies, airbags, belts and main interior parts like dashboard and steering wheel are included. Currently four models are available, each of a different vehicle class. To indicate the performance of the multi-body vehicle models for crashworthiness optimization of a fleet a study on offset frontal impacts is performed. Using the multi-body models a series of parameter sweeps over relevant accident and design parameters were performed.