The impact of improved vehicle design on highway safety

This paper describes a framework for evaluating the safety of automobile designs in terms of likelihood of accident occurrence and severity of likely injuries sustained. Fault-tree analysis is utilized to model interacting relationships between causative factors that affect accident occurrence. A multiattribute injury model based on harm measures obtained from the National Accident Sampling System Database is presented to describe accident severity. By combining the two sub-models, a risk profile for a single automobile design is constructed. The risk profile is then used I) descriptively, as a basis for comparing competing design alternatives through multiobjective analysis and 2) prescriptively, as a tool to highlight causative factors worthy of crash protection and crash-avoidance design research. (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Limited.