EuroFOT Safety Impact Assessment Method and Results

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are widely expected to deliver a major contribution to the improvement of road safety. Insight into the safety benefits of ITS is an important ingredient in the deployment of ITS. Assessing these benefits is one of the research goals of the EuroFOT project, a large scale field trial that involves more than five hundred instrumented vehicles on the road all over Europe. Most of these vehicles have one or more ITS applications on board, including continuously operating ones like adaptive cruise control (ACC). This paper described the method that is used in EuroFOT to assess the safety impact of the continuously operating systems. This approach has some similarities to existing methods but includes novel aspects to handle the fact that the systems are continuously active, and to deal with specific limitations and conditions of the tests and test data of EuroFOT. The paper further describes the first results of the method applied to sample data from the first phase of the FOT.