Abstract

The future of vehicle safety will bring a fusion of active and passive safety into integrated safety to further reduce the number of injuries in road traffic. This development requires a closer interaction of different simulation domains that are nowadays separated. Therefore, new methods and processes must be established so that integrated safety systems can be developed and assessed accordingly. These methods and processes must cover relevant aspects from normal driving to crash, e.g. driving dynamics, sensors, active-safety algorithms, vehicle structure deformations, restraint systems, and occupant behaviour. Apart from the need to combine all these different simulation domains, this development poses an additional challenge to passive safety system evaluation: A scenario-based assessment consisting of a large number of simulation runs instead of evaluating a limited number of test cases. Classical finite element crash simulations require considerable simulation effort to deliver precise results and are therefore not suited for such types of large-scale analysis. Consequently, new, time-efficient methods need to be developed , which significantly reduce calculation time while still providing acceptable result prediction quality. As a possible solution addressing this challenge, mathematical and physical surrogate models for all time-consuming simulation steps are presented in this paper, enabling a time-efficient safety performance assessment of combined active and passive safety systems. As a proof-of-concept of the method, an assessment of two integrated safety system variants consisting of an autonomous braking (AEB) system and a standard restraint system is presented. The potential of the integrated safety system to reduce occupant injury risk is shown using 285 virtually generated accidents, resulting in a total number of 285*3=855 simulation runs (285 runs for the baseline plus 285 runs for each integrated safety system variant). As an additional benefit, the developed fast-calculating surrogate models’ usage also allows for a case-specific optimisation of the restraint system. By that, the potential for reducing the occupant injury risk can be increased even more.