Evgenikos P., Papantoniou P., Yannis G., “Review of the evaluation procedures related to safety systems”, Proceedings of the 5th Pan-hellenic Road Safety Conference, Volos, October 2012.

During the past decade several eSafety systems were developed for vehicles and promising future improvements of road safety are expected to rely on such safety functions. Especially for active safety systems attempting to avoid accidents through active support to the driver, which are currently under rapid development, no generally accepted assessment program is in place, thus there is a need for standardised testing and assessment methods. The objective of this research is the examination of existing test procedures used for the evaluation of various technological systems related to vehicle safety. For that reason a thorough literature review was carried out in to identify the most appropriate procedures that are currently used or are under development to test the various technological systems and examine if these procedures are relevant to road accident problems. The difference between active and passive safety is explained and the intelligent transport systems are categorised in two different ways. The different organizations and bodies involved to the development of the test procedures are described, as well as methodologies for testing and evaluation of preventive safety functions that have been addressed in several research projects in Europe and US during the last years are presented. Moreover, several test procedures concerning active safety are described in a standardised way, and some detailed information regarding ISO and SAE standards is provided. The results of the research revealed that while test methods for validation of ICT-based safety systems with drivers in the loop are not widely applied, there are certain methods for testing specific systems, mainly given by means of standards. The measured data recorded through testing procedures can be used to calculate safety performance indicators describing the performance of the safety function and the evaluation of a safety system for regulatory consideration requires full attention and further concrete steps that could involve educating consumers on the merits of a safety system, incentivizing automobile manufacturers to make the system readily available or further analyzing the system. This work has been undertaken in the EC funded DaCoTA project.