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Development and evaluation of potential accident scenarios involving pedestrians and AEB-equipped vehicles…

Following article, Development and evaluation of potential accident scenarios involving pedestrians and AEB-equipped vehicles to demonstrate the efficiency of an enhanced open-source simulation framework, has just been published in Accident Analysis & Prevention.

The study was performed within the VIRTUAL project and was written by Martin Schachner, Wolfgang Sinz, Robert Thomson and Corina Klug. The overall objective of this study is to introduce a conceptual simulation framework to evaluate the efficacy of active safety systems.

Abstract
This study introduces a method that allows the generation and safety evaluation of a scenario catalog derived from potential car-pedestrian conflict situations. It is based on open-source software components and uses the road layout standard OpenDRIVE to derive participants’ motion profiles with the support of available accident data. The method was implemented upon the open-source framework openPASS and can simulate results for different active safety system setups and facilitates the prediction of system capabilities to decrease the relative impact velocities and collision configurations such as the point of impact. A demonstration case was performed where the scenario catalog was derived and used to evaluate pedestrian collisions with and without a generic autonomous emergency braking (AEB) system. The AEB system aims to intervene in the event of an impending collision and might affect the outcome of a baseline scenario. The study indicated a change in the collision configuration and identified conflict situations less affected by the system. A particularly interesting finding was that some scenarios even led to a higher number of collisions (at lower impact) for the AEB intervention in comparison to the baseline cases.Conclusio

Conclusions
This work introduces an open-source approach that uses the road network description format OpenDRIVE to develop a scenario catalog. The drawbacks of the application of case-based real-world accidents have been identified and addressed. A catalog in excess of 46,000 scenarios was derived with the developed methodology for a single pedestrian crossing, which has been rapidly simulated and evaluated. Real-world accident data can be incorporated in the scenario catalog. It is however not limited to the reconstructed cases only. Also scenarios in between observed real-world cases should be considered, which can be done with the introduced method. The introduced open-source tool allows users to combine generic and real-world scenarios to assess conflict situations in a manifold and systematic way. The catalog can be used to reveal malfunctioning and possible shortcomings of active safety measures and for the determination of remaining future pedestrian accidents and their configurations, which should be addressed by passive safety measures.