Research On Crash Compatibility Of Motor Vehicles Based On Historical Crash Data

Abstract:Traffic crashes cause enormous losses to the human beings’ lives and property. Those factors influencing crashes occurring include drivers’behaviour, vehicles’safety performance, road facility and driving environment, in which vehicles’safety performance is regarded as an important factor. Safety characteristics of motor-vehicles have long been a prominent focus of traffic safety research. As more and more heavy vehicles were driven on roads recently, crashes involving heavy vehicles and passenger cars have brought in serious injury severity, the crash compatibility of motor-vehicles attracts people’s attention. Crash compatibility includes crashworthiness and crash aggressivity. Most previous researches focused on the evaluation and improvement of vehicles’crashworthiness, with the overlook of the potential hazardousness vehicles imposing to other vehicles. In order to improve road safety comprehensively, a reasonable evaluation for vehicles’crash compatibility should be done at the vehicle design or manufacture stage, and those results should be published to the public and associate regulators. Traditional evaluation of vehicles’crash compatibility is based on the vehicle crash test or simulation, which may be biased from the reality. This paper conducts a research with respect to the motor-vehicles’ crash compatibility based on the historical crash database. The research contents and main conclusions are presented as follows:Firstly, a literature review is conducted concerning with vehicles’ crash compatibility. The development processes, relative methodologies and results for crash compatibility are reviewed, and the current problems and potential solutions are proposed.Secondly, the Bayesian methods are introduced to the evaluation of car brands’crashworthiness and crash aggressivity. The limitation of traditional methods is the nature of data aggregation, which can be settled by the proposed Bayesian hierarchical ordered logistic model.Thirdly,23popular car brands’crashworthiness and crash aggressivity performance are studied and the estimated values are obtained. Results show that there are significant differences among different car brands.Fourthly, On the basis of the existing research results, this paper proposes an integrated model to evaluate vehicles’crash compatibility. The crash compatibility performances of23passenger cars are estimated, and results show that there are significant differences of crash compatibility among different car brands.Fifthly, based on the ranks of car brands’crashworthiness index, crash aggressivity index and crash compatibility index, the relationship among the three indexes are illustrated. It is indicated that the relationship between the crash compatibility and crashworthiness is closer than that with crash aggressivity.