EG Safety
Motivation
Road safety is an essential element of sustainability in mobility and transport. Casualties on European roads have halved in the past three decades, while traffic has tripled (European Commission, European Road Safety Action Programme, 2003).
The automotive industry envisages an ongoing evolution towards a safe and secure mobility and transport system through an integrated approach. Apart from the inherent safety risk of any road transport due to complex traffic situations, research should be driven to limit the increasing security threat on European roads.
Research Objectives
Accidents and fatalities on European roads shall be further reduced despite an increasing number of kilometres driven. But further improvements in road safety require an integrated approach involving all the stakeholders (infrastructure designers and engineers, car manufacturers, policy makers, suppliers, road operators, road users etc.).
Graphic: Safety application based on ICT technologies,
e.g. Emergency vehicle warning.
Major research objectives are:
- Promote all initiatives towards cooperative systems for interaction and exchange of safety relevant information between vehicles and the infrastructures. Stimulate research on the validation and standardisation of sensor and communication data.
- Create and maintain a common roadmap/ framework for research activities in cooperative systems in coordination with mobility for transport.
- Promote further development and integration of passive or active on-board systems to support the driver and avoid or mitigate collisions.
- Promote further development and integration of driver status and attention monitoring systems, to reliably evaluate level of attention and safe driving capabilities and to adapt the possible intervention of on board safety systems to the driving conditions.
- Promote virtual systems for more efficient development of safety features.
- Promote the security of cars and particularly of cargo and/or freight vehicles in order to lower the risk of crime as well as to ensure the tracking of the assets in case of a crime.
Strategic Vision
The next breakthrough in traffic safety requires an integrated approach to create cooperative systems using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) should support and interface with in-vehicle safety systems to exchange information and reinforce operational strategies in order to optimize safety goals. Furthermore, a new set of challenges should be taken into account such as the integrated safety of alternative-powered vehicles and the development of new automotive services.
Key targets include:
- Provide the necessary solutions to improve safety taking into account the increase in mobility and the need to reduce fuel consumption, CO2 and noise
- Promote suitable safety tests in order to come up with standards for safety of vehicles with alternative propulsion, and for the safe integration of e-drive components (packaging, cooling concepts, functional safety, shutdown strategies for power electronics, etc.).
- Pave the way for future standardization and harmonized roll-out of services.
Graphic: Safety applications based on ICT technologies, e.g. intersection assistance