Advanced safety systems which use pre-crash sensing information from the environment and/or the vehicle occupants have an “active response” which improve primary or secondary safety. Many systems are in development which use pre-crash sensing information as a decision input and it is widely predicted that the implementation of such safety systems, together with appropriate actuators and control algorithms, offer significant safety potential.

Existing test methods evaluate the crash performance of a vehicle, but are unsuitable for the assessment of advanced safety systems because additional evaluations of the sensing performance and the effect of autonomous actions on the driver response are required. To meet this need, work package 1.3 of the European Advanced Protection Systems (APROSYS) project developed a generic methodology which was intended to define guidelines for development of a specific test programme. This paper presents the final generic methodology for advanced safety systems and details a ‘test case’ carried out to demonstrate the application of the methodology.