The proportion of highway roads in India is 5% of total road network, which accounts for 63% of the road fatalities (MORTH, 2015). According to a RASSI study, in 50% of the accidents, there were no accident avoidance manoeuvres from the drivers. Only in 30% of the accidents, drivers performed a brake or swerve manoeuvre or a combination of both. This research aims to evaluate the potential benefits of the Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB), in such collision scenarios, based on the real world data collected from four sampling locations on Indian roads.

Road Accident Sampling System – India (RASSI) database is used for this research. A total of 1779 real world accidents from three different sampling locations are examined by means of in-depth accident reports consisting of about 700 variables per accident case. Accident characteristics prior to the collision are derived using technical reconstruction.

This study focusses on passenger vehicle only and accordingly, data screening is conducted using key parameters to obtain relevant data where effectiveness of AEB can be demonstrated. Vehicle movement prior to critical event (i.e., only vehicle going in a straight line path) and pre-impact stability (i.e., vehicle skidding longitudinally but yaw angle less than 30 deg.) are the two conditions for selecting the cases. A total of 23 cases sufficed to the above criteria and these are reconstructed using PC-Crash.

For each case, a 0.8g deceleration pulse of AEB is implemented in the vehicle trajectory. Each case is reconstructed again and the benefit is registered in the following three categories:​ total collision avoidance, impact speed reduction and no benefit.

The AEB system is currently evaluated for front-rear configuration where driver intervened with emergency manoeuvres. However, the applicability of the system for other accident configurations has to be evaluated as well. Moreover, the current dataset involves data only from National Highways, where generally, the travelling speed is on the higher side. However, the applicability is restricted only to front-rear collision scenarios and the system benefit has to be established further for a wider range of accident scenarios as well.