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It is generally accepted that the targets for fatality reduction in car accidents set by Governments in Europe, USA and Japan can only be met by using advanced technologies that will include a broad range of sensors to monitor the crash likelihood and severity, vehicle condition, occupant type and posture. Information provided by these sensors can be used to increase the effectiveness of restraint systems. On the basis of information on the vehicle and the occupant status during the crash event, restraint parameters such as belt force and airbag outflow could be controlled real-time in such a way that injury levels sustained by the occupants are minimized. Real-time control during the crash event enables restraint systems to adapt to real world conditions and offers improved performance in terms of injury reduction over a much broader range of impact scenarios.

The ASSESS project is a European Commission co-funded project that aimed to develop harmonized and standardized assessment procedures for collision mitigation and avoidance systems. ASSESS was one of the first European projects which dealt in depth with the concept of integrated safety, defining methodologies to analyse vehicle safety from a global point of view. As such, the developed procedures included driver behaviour evaluation, pre-crash and crash system performance evaluation and socio-economic assessment. The activities performed for the crash evaluation focussed on the influence of braking manoeuvres in occupant positioning through dynamic braking manoeuvres with real occupants and Madymo and LS-Dyna simulations. The assessment of the passive safety protection level according to the results of the influence of the active systems is based on sled testing and full vehicle testing.