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This paper presents a framework to characterize the capability of an automotive rear-end crash avoidance system that integrates forward crash warning and adaptive cruise control functionalities. This system characterization describes the operational performance of the system and its main components in the driving environment, based on data to be collected from instrumented vehicles driven by volunteer subjects as their own vehicles under real-world conditions. This characterization is pursuing a number of objectives dealing with the capability of system components including the forward-looking sensor suite, alert logic, automatic vehicle controls, and driver-vehicle interface. A number of subobjectives and concomitant measures are delineated. Examples are provided to illustrate the analysis process of this framework based on data recently collected from system verification tests.

This paper presents recent results of on-going research to build new maps of driver performance in car-following situations. The novel performance map is comprised of four driving states: low risk, conflict, near crash, and crash imminent - which correspond to advisory warning, crash imminent warning, and crash mitigation countermeasures. The paper addresses two questions dealing with the approach to quantify the boundaries between the driving states: (1) Do the quantified boundaries strongly depend on the dynamic scenario encountered in the driving environment? and (2) Do the quantified boundaries vary between steering and braking driver responses? Specifically, braking and steering driver performances are examined in two car-following scenarios: lead vehicle stopped and lead vehicle moving at lower constant speed.

This paper describes the safety evaluation results from a Field Operational Test (FOT) of an Intelligent Cruise Control (ICC) system. The primary goal of this evaluation was to determine safety effects of the ICC system. Safety surrogate measures were established and examined for normal driving situations as well as for safety–critical situations. It was found that use of the ICC system in the FOT was generally associated with safer driving compared to manual control and is projected to result in net safety benefits if widely deployed.

The potential safety benefits of an Intelligent Cruise Control (ICC) system are assessed in terms of the number of rear-end crashes that might be avoided on U.S. freeways if all vehicles were equipped with such a system. This analysis utilizes naturalistic driving data collected from a field operational test that involved 108 volunteers who drove ten passenger cars for about 68 and 35 thousand miles in manual and ICC control modes, respectively. The effectiveness of the ICC system is estimated at about 17 percent based on computer simulations of two rear-end precrash scenarios that are distinguished by whether the following vehicle encounters a suddenly-decelerating or slow-moving lead vehicle. The ICC system has the potential to eliminate approximately 13 thousand policereported rear-end crashes on U.S. freeways, using 1996 national crash statistics.