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Integrity of virtual testing for crash protection

The interest in virtual testing is globally rapidly increasing because of several advantages compared to physical tests in laboratories. In the area of passive car safety, finite element simulations can be used to get further insights, use more biofidelic human models and make the overall assessment more robust by incorporating more variety in the virtual testing load cases. For a successful implementation of virtual testing in regulations or consumer information, the integrity of the procedure has to be ensured. As car simulation models used within the virtual testing are usually not shared with the evaluation institutions due to intellectual property (IP) issues, this is a challenging task. Stringent validation and certification procedures are needed and it has to be ensured that the models used in these steps are the same as the ones used for the virtual testing. In this paper, we developed a secure procedure for model version control.

Through analysis of possible threats for both sides, car manufacturer and evaluation institution, we defined requirements, which the new procedure should satisfy. These requirements state that the integrity and authenticity of all shared documents should be protected, as well as the confidentiality of the simulation model. By considering all prerequisites, we developed an architecture for a new procedure.

The proposed procedure in this paper makes it possible to trace which parts of the simulation model have been subject to modification without disclosing IP-protected information. Furthermore, the consistency between the simulation results and the input files can be checked. This ensures that models used in the previous qualification procedures was indeed used throughout the virtual test and that results were generated with the qualified models and therefore significantly improves the integrity of the procedure. We have implemented a proof-of-concept for the FE software package LS-DYNA and made it publicly available.

This research paper ‘Integrity of virtual testing for crash protection‘, published today, is written by Esma Galijatovic, Maria Eichlseder, Simon Franz Heindl and Corina Klug. The master’s thesis in which this study was performed has received support from the VIRTUAL project.

Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. The code developed in this study is available via https://openvt.eu/Integrity_check/proof-of-concept-scripts