Forward collisions are still the most relevant scenarios in the German accident situation with personal damage. Therefore forward-looking safety systems have a high potential to reduce the number of casualties or to mitigate their injury severity.

To assess the benefit of these forward-looking safety systems, a new benefit assessment method will be presented in this paper. The method uses real accidents out of the GIDAS. Additionally to the collision speed of the vehicle and other impact parameters, all accidents in GIDAS are reconstructed regarding the movement of all participants in the last seconds prior to the impact.

This movement is used to simulate the accident initiation phase with and without the influences of forward-looking safety systems. Subsequent to this simulations the differences with and without safety system could be compared case by case. The results could be converted into different absolute measures like reduction of fatalities or severely injured pedestrians, using injury severity functions.

The results of this study are different correlations, depending on the system functionality, between the reduced impact speed due to braking prior to the crash and the assessed mitigation on injury severity. The results of the single case simulation could be summarized to access the overall benefit of these systems in the whole accident scenario.

With this method it is possible to assess the expected benefit of future safety systems or equally suitable to evidence the benefit of current safety systems on the market.

The papers show the detailed procedure of the method and some examples of usage the results.