This conference paper was submitted for presentation at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

Numerical simulation is a key element on our way to 'œVision Zero'. The EU-funded project 'œV4SAFETY' (Vehicles and VRU Virtual eValuation of Road Safety, https://v4safetyproject.eu/) addresses this topic by providing a widely accepted and harmonized predictive assessment framework for road safety. An essential part are guidelines and recommendations for models and simulation components to properly address different types of safety measures. This paper presents the method for the simulation structure setup that was developed in V4SAFETY. The method can deliver a simulation structure (models and interactions) that is specific to a given impact assessment task. First, a suitable generic simulation structure is defined. This simulation structure consists of models and their interactions during runtime. Which models the structure contains is mostly defined by the combination of the relevant scenario, especially the road user to be protected, and the safety measure whose impact should be assessed. It needs to be noted that, in the context of V4SAFETY, there is always a vehicle in the scenario - as most crashes are vehicle-related. The structure consists of a pre-crash and an in-crash related part. The pre-crash part consists of models active before a crash occurs '“ typically, this is a multi-physics setup as various simulation domains must be connected. The in-crash part consists of models that are used for in-crash simulation, typically finite element, multibody or surrogate models. A three-step process is defined to come to an appropriate simulation structure: 1) A generic structure is selected out of pre-defined structures. The selection is based on information about the type of safety measure and the road user to be protected. 2) Depending on the chosen type of safety measure, the structure is further detailed, especially the in-crash part. This step is based on the evaluation metric chosen to quantify the impact of the safety measure. 3) The simulation structure is further refined using additional information given in the evaluation scope/research question. The whole process is implemented in an interactive browser-based tool allowing the user to quickly come to an evaluation-scope-specific simulation structure. This information can then be used to export the simulation structure in a standardised format like SSP (System Structure and Parameterization) and further to set up a process to automatically come to a complete, executable simulation model for safety impact assessments of road safety measures.