Networking and integration of active and passive safety systems

Every two minutes a car occupant was involved in an accident, every two hours a road death happened, every 13 hours a pedestrian was killed and every 19 hours a cyclist died - these were the tragic statistic of accidents on Germany's roads in 2009 [10]. Networking and integrating active as well as passive vehicle safety systems constitutes an important approach to reduce the number of road deaths to zero (Vision Zero campaign [13]). Therefore special tools for developing and testing such integrated and networked automotive safety systems have to be devised. This paper points out one attempt at a solution: developing an integrated tool environment consisting of a Model-in-the-Loop, a Software-in-the-Loop and a real-time Hardware-in-the-Loop system containing a crash simulation based on real and simulated crash data as well as vehicle simulation. It also includes a fail-safe tester to be able to test the physical errors. With such a system, the development and test of new integrated safety systems will be facilitated and missed failures can be diminished. This paper describes the challenges in developing such a highly integrated and complex tool.