Numerical Technologies for Vulnerable Road User Safety Enhancement

The progress in pedestrian and cyclist safety enhancement is the result of multi-stage work, which bases mainly on the appropriate traffic organization and road engineering. However, the full separation of vehicle traffic and pedestrians/cyclists seems to be unmanageable nowadays. Thus, the paper presents a dual approach for vulnerable road user safety enhancement by the use of state-of-the-art numerical technologies. Firstly, the detection technologies are presented which observe the vehicles environment in order to detect, track and classify the surrounding objects, providing data for active safety systems and as well as vehicle's driver. Their system architectures also create communication interface between a human and automobile via the accident-avoidance technology and pre-crash sensing. Secondly, when the collision is unavoidable, the passive safety structures and systems are in operation aimed at pedestrian/cyclist injuries mitigation. Hence, the authors carried out passive safety virtual simulations to evaluate the response of the human body after a vehicle impact.