Pre-Crash Scenarios for Determining Target Populations of Active Safety Systems

The objective of active safety systems is to prevent or mitigate collisions. A critical component in the design of active safety systems is to identify the target population for a proposed system. The target population for an active safety system is that set of crashes that a proposed system could prevent or mitigate. Target crashes have scenarios in which the sensors and algorithms would likely activate. For example, the rear-end crash scenario, where the front of one vehicle contacts another vehicle traveling in the same direction and in the same lane as the striking vehicle, is one scenario in which Forward Collision Warning (FCW) would be most effective in mitigating or preventing. This paper presents novel pre-crash scenarios based upon coded variables from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA’s) nationally representative crash databases. Using three databases the scenarios developed in this study can be used to quantify the number of police reported crashes, seriously injured occupants, and fatalities that are applicable to proposed systems. In this paper, we use the pre-crash scenarios to identify the target populations for FCW, Lane Departure Warning (LDW), and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) or Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) systems. This study found that these three systems could potentially mitigate or prevent 59% of both seriously injured occupants and fatalities.