Safety

We are developing a traffic simulator called  STREET, which is intended to enable us to
evaluate safety systems. To evaluate safety systems, however, we have to be able to faithfully
reproduce traffic accidents that are caused by interactive events between vehicles and between
vehicles and pedestrians. To this end, it is  necessary to construct  a driver model that
incorporates cognition, decision-making, and operation behaviors.  STREET simulates the
behavior of drivers and traffic  accidents that are caused by driver errors. In this paper, we
describe a driver model for  STREET, in which a driver recognizes the environment
surrounding his or her vehicle by using their abilities, and then decides the most appropriate
driving maneuver as affected by the driver’s characteristics. Also, we propose a method of
reproducing traffic accidents that are caused by a driver’s ability to perform non-driving tasks
being adversely affected. In addition, we talk about evaluating the ratio of accidents
with/without active safety systems.

TOYOTA CENTRAL R&D LABS., INC.

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

This paper describes a development of vision sensor that can detect shockwave propagation
that is one of main factors of accidents in highway traffic flow. In addition, realization of a
driver assistance system that informs arrival of such shockwave to drivers by the vision sen-
sors is shown. To evaluate the reliability of the system, both recall rate and false rate of the
system is investigated by sensing results of the sensors. As a result, it is shown that the detec-
tion of shockwaves and judgment of warning in the system should be decided in downstream
sensors to minimalize these rates.

Institute of Industrial Science the University of Tokyo

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

Certification is commonly required for safety related applications, including those dealing
with localization. With the upcoming European satellite based localization system, the need
arises for the safety related certification of the corresponding applications and devices. The
existence of standards is mandatory for this sort of certification. For economic reasons, it
seems sensible to share knowledge and determine the application of standards across various
domains (e.g. different forms of transportation such as railways, avionics, maritime and road
transportation). To improve the tangibility of such documents, the application and utilization
of formal specifications and descriptions can help the communication process between
various stakeholders.

Institute for Traffic Safety and Automation Engineering
Technical University of Braunschweig

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

The aim of the paper is to present the results of a study about involving the human error into
traffic modeling. The analysis of driver’s behavior in a selected traffic situation (drivers do or
do not stop at red light) provided us to define the meaning human error in the context. Based
on Bayesian theorem, the probability of bad decision is one of the results of the first part of
this paper. Having built the junctions in VISSIM environment, and after a detailed
investigation of output parameters (in simulated traffic there is no car passing at red), a
software module was developed for having the bad decision probabilities using VISSIM.
Grouping drivers by driving style (aggressive, normal, slow) gives opportunity (defining
numbers of driver passing at red) to find the missing link. The trial version of this software
now is able to define the probability of bad decision using VISSIM outputs.

Széchenyi István University

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

The present paper investigates the warning timing of a forward obstacle collision warning
system (FOCWS). Driving simulator experiments are performed to verify the influence of
visible distance of forward obstacles, which varies depending on the environmental brightness
(daytime or nighttime), on the obstacle (pedestrian or vehicle), and the influence of the
warning timing on the driver's avoidance actions. Moreover, situation-adaptive warning
timing based on the visibility of forward obstacles  is proposed, and the driving simulator
experiments reveal the effectiveness and acceptability of the system.

Department of Systems Science, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University

DENSO CORPORATION

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York