The Integrated Safety programme and the eSafety initiative stress that the development of Intelligent Transport Systems in vehicles or on roads (and especially in the safety field) must be preceded and accompanied by a scientific accident analysis encompassing two main issues:
The general objective of the TRACE project (TRaffic Accident Causation in Europe) is to address these two issues by providing the scientific community, the stakeholders, the suppliers, the vehicle industry and the other Integrated Safety program participants with a global overview of the road accident causation issues in Europe, and possibly overseas, based on the analysis of any and all current available databases which include accident, injury, insurance, medical and exposure data (including driver behavior in normal driving conditions). The idea is to identify, characterise and quantify the nature of risk factors, groups at risk, specific conflict driving situations and accident situations; and to estimate the safety benefits of a selection of technology-based safety functions. Expected outcomes are essentially reports. Beside this, TRACE proposes three different research angles for the definition and the characterization of accident causation factors, and to improve the methods actually used in accident analysis (diagnosis and evaluation, especially with regards to statistical techniques and human behaviour analysis).
Finally, TRACE intends to base the analyses on available, reliable and accessible existing and ongoing databases (access to which is greatly facilitated by a series of partners highly experienced in safety analysis, coming from 8 different countries and having access to different kinds of databases, in-depth or regional or national statistics in their own country, and for some of them in additional countries).
The project is to last 2 years (January 2006 – December 2007) and involves 16 full partners and 6 sub contractors for a total of 386 men-months.