Effectiveness of a Current Commercial Vehicle Forward Collision Avoidance and Mitigation Systems 2013-01-2394

This paper focuses on the safety performance of Commercial Vehicle Forward Collision Avoidance and Mitigation Systems (F-CAM) that include Forward Collision Warning (FCW) with Collision Mitigation Braking (CMB) technology as applied to heavy trucks, including single unit and tractor semitrailers.

The study estimated the safety benefits of a commercially available F-CAM system considered to be representative of products currently in service. The functional characteristics were evaluated and its performance generically modeled to estimate safety benefits. This was accomplished through the following steps: (1) first characterize the actual performance of these systems in various pre-crash scenarios under controlled test track conditions, and then reverse engineering the algorithms that control warnings and automatic braking actions; (2) developing a comprehensive set of simulated crash events representative of actual truck striking rear-end crashes. This virtual, “reference” crash database was developed by analyzing vehicle interactions (or conflicts) from naturalistic studies to create thousands of crashes in a computer simulation environment; (3) overlaying the F-CAM generic algorithms into the simulations of each crash event and observe the kinematic impacts (i.e., benefits) from having initiated warnings and/or automatic braking (including reduction in impact speed, or crash elimination of the crash).

The crash population that could likely benefit from the technologies was identified using nationally representative crash databases. The results from the simulation studies were applied to the national crash population and are presented in terms of crashes avoided, reductions in fatalities, injuries and property damage.