Functional integration: Possibilities and Challenges - INSAFES project
13th World Congress & Exhibition on Intelligent Transport Systems and Services
ExCel London, United Kingdom
Tuesday 10 October 2006
Intereactive Session IS3 : PT - Public transport transit
Authors : A. Sjögren (Volvo Technology AB), A. Amditis, A. Polychronopoulos (ICCS)
Abstract
Traditionally, vehicle safety has been divided into passive and active safety systems, where the passive safety systems of a vehicle reduce the effects of an accident once it has happened, and active safety systems help preventing accidents. Examples of traditionally passive safety systems are shock absorbing vehicle structures and safety belts, and of active safety systems, head lights, that help preventing accidents in darkness by improving the driver vision, or the ABS system that helps the driver to perform a more optimal braking manoeuvre.
Many modern safety systems can be sorted under the heading e-safety, meaning that they use sensors and electronics. In recent years systems that do not only react to in-vehicle signals (such as airbags being triggered by an accelerometer signal) but also react to the surrounding traffic, have been introduced. With knowledge about the surrounding traffic the strict boarder between active and passive safety systems is becoming less obvious. Passive safety measures can be calibrated or even activated before the actual accident. Similarly automatic emergency braking can be activated in order to mitigate the effect of a collision. Is this still a passive safety measure? The purpose is still to reduce the effects of an accident, but one can argue that it would have been possible to avoid the accident completely by initiating the braking earlier and then it would have been an active safety system. An integrated approach where active and passive safety systems work together and perhaps also cooperate with more comfort oriented systems has a potential to increase the systems’ efficiency.
 Paper 1499
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