Course Syllabus

TME202 Vehicle and Traffic Safety / Fordons och trafiksäkerhet
Course Plan
2019/20 (LP 2)

TME202 Vehicle and Traffic Safety is a course offered from the Mechanics and Marine Sciences Department during the second quarter of the first year of the Master Programme for Automotive Engineering (MPAUT). The course is 7.5 credits. The possible grades are 5, 4, 3, not passed. The course is given in English and is mandatory for the completion of the MPAUT Master’s Degree.

Aim

The objective of this course is to provide the student with a basic understanding of the role of passive and active safety (including automated driving) in the context of traffic safety. After this course, the student will have knowledge that can be applied in an automotive engineering career. The student will have: an overview of the literature in the field of active and passive safety, analyzed and simulated components of passive and active safety systems, and gained fundamental knowledge of designing active and passive systems.

Course specific prerequisites

BSc in Engineering, i.e. Mathematics, Physics, as well as at least one course in Programming (6 credits)

Learning outcomes (after completion of the course the student should be able to):

• Describe various means to reduce traffic related fatalities and injuries
• Discuss the effect of different car structure design and crash configurations on in-crash load paths in the vehicle and in the occupants
• Explain means to avoid incompatibility between different road vehicles and road furniture
• Describe how car restraints and car structure can reduce injury risk
• Relate the biomechanics of the human body to crash safety
• Describe the basics of the explicit finite element method and give examples of how simulations can be used to assess crash safety
• Describe the process of performing a finite element simulation of a crash structure
• Compare simulations to experimental data and discuss the similarities and discrepancies
• List the most important sensor principles under consideration for automotive safety applications and to explain their basic technological advantages and limitations
• Motivate the scope of active safety in the context of traffic safety
• Describe the general architecture of state-of-art active safety systems
• Provide examples of active safety systems on the market and describe their operation and implementation
• Explain what cooperative systems are and how they can be used to extend the functionalities of state-of-art active safety systems
• Discuss the importance of human factors in the design of active safety systems and automated vehicles
• Illustrate the tools currently available for evaluating active safety system
• Use tools to plan and organize diverse group work effectively
• Reflect on the group dynamics in an international team
• Apply data visualization techniques on the available data from different perspectives
• Design and apply basic data pre-processing routines/techniques for naturalistic driving data sets
• Understand and reflect on data characteristics/limitations and uncertainty in accident scenario reconstruction for EDR (event data recorders)

Content

• Accidentology and epidemiology
• Crashworthiness
• Compatibility
• Future vehicle designs
• Restraint designs
• Testing
• Crash test dummy design
• Injury assessments
• Infrastructure design
• Systems for Active Safety
• Sensors for Integrated Safety
• Cooperative systems
• Human factors
• Active safety evaluation
• Crash analysis and crash data
• Signal processing and data visualization
• Analysis of crashes and near-crashes from field data
• Group diversity training

Organisation

- Lectures

- Workshops
- Assignments: “Labs” and exercises

Literature

Handouts of lecture notes as provided on the course homepage (CANVASs).

 

Required and supplementary/optional reading is offered on the CANVASs course page. The following ebooks are available:

• Accidental Injury, Yoganandan, N., Nahum, A., Melvin, J.; Springer, 2015
• Trauma Biomechanics:An introduction to Injury Biomechanics, Schmitt, K-W, Niederer, P., Cronin, D., Muser, M., Walz, F., Springer, 2014

 

Note that no literature purchases will be needed to complete the course.

 

 

Examination

• Examination Passive Safety (Part C; 2 of the 7.5 points total)
• Examination Active Safety (Part B; 2 of the 7.5 points total))
• Each student must actively participate in the assignments (labs and exercises). There will be different groups for each lab and exercise. Each group will consist of two students. The groups will be randomly assigned by the teachers. The course consists of two lab assignments: The Passive Safety Laboratory & Simulation Assignment (Part A: 2 of the 7.5 points total) and the Active Safety Lab Assignment (Part D: 1.5 of the 7.5 points total), and four exercises (Pass/Fail): 1) Signal Processing Passive Safety, 2) Signal Processing Active Safety, 3) Naturalistic Driving Data, and 4) Event Data Recorders. In summary: Each student will be randomly assigned to six (6) groups with two students in each. All exercises and assignments will be checked for plagiarism and their completions is mandatory for the completion of the course.
• Mandatory attendance is required for:
  • Introductory workshop on group diversity Study Weeks 1 and 5

The final grade is based on the average of the normalized examination scores (Part B and Part C). The examination is what is used for the course grade. The overall exam percentage is calculated as:

100*(Your_Points_PS/Max_Points_PS +Your_Points_AS/Max_Points_AS)/2.

If the overall exam percentage is 40% or above, the student has passed the exam.

All group work (assignments: labs and exercises) are pass/fail.

The final grade is then:

• fail: overall exam percentage <40%
• 3: 40 <= overall exam percentage < 60%
• 4: 60 <= overall exam percentage < 80%
• 5: 80 <= overall exam percentage

During the exam, you may use a dictionary, pens, rulers, and a simple calculator (such as, or equivalent to, Texas Instruments TI30).

Time and place for the examination will be posted on the student portal (make sure to choose 2019/2020) and the exam-date page (search for TME202).

Teaching Team

Examiner:

• Jonas Bärgman (responsible Active Safety)               031-7725846     bargman@chalmers.se

Teachers:

• Robert Thomson (responsbile Passive Safety) 031-7723645                           thomson@chalmers.se
• Marco Dozza                                             031-7723621     dozza@chalmers.se
• Giulio Piccinini                                             031-7721421              piccinini@chalmers.se 
• András Balint                                             031-7723648              balint@chalmers.se  
• Rebecca Bergman               031-772 2644   becky@chalmers.se
• Pinar Boyraz Baykas               031-772 8236    boyraz@chalmers.se

 

Teaching/lab/assignment/exercise assistants:

• Ron Schindler                                                                                                          0705091536               schindler@chalmers.se
• Alexander Rasch                                                                031-7726465              rasch@chalmers.se  
• I Putu Alit Putra                                             031-7721420     putra@chalmers.se
• Alexandros Leledakis                                                           leladakis@volvocars.com

Changes from last year

• New lecturers for some lectures with corresponding changes to content details.
• Updates/refinement of lecture content and reading material.
• An industry visit (similar visit to that in a previous course) was removed to make space for one additional lecture and an exercise: A lecture and an exercise on Event Data Recorders that previously was in the TME192 (Active Safety) course, as it fits better in the VTS course.
• New teaching assistants
• The 2x2 hour lectures on crash databases and epidemiology has been consolidated to one session of 3 hours.
• The exercise on Naturalistic Driving Data this year requires a CANVAS hand-in and will be graded Pass/Fail
• Previous years students themselves performed “crash tests”. Due to limited laboratory facilities, no testing will be performed by the students this year. Students will be given data from experiments that they will have to process and analyze. This change was made allow students to focus on the data analysis rather than solving technical issues.

Schedule

The course is divided into one passive safety part (Part C) and one active safety part (Part B). Each part with has its own written exam and responsible teacher (see above).

Eight hours a week are allocated for lectures and assignments/exercises for course:

• 8:00-11:45 on Mondays
• 10:00-12:00 on Wednesdays (not all weeks, see schedule) for computer and assignment support
• 13:15-17:00 on Wednesdays

A complete schedule with the title of the lectures and the name of the lecturers is continuously updated on this course CANVAS page. The room for each lecture/exercise is posted on TimeEdit. Note that the rooms provided in the schema/schedule are preliminary! TimeEdit-entries are what should be used.

The course schedule is reported in CANVAS page.

Finally, make sure you comply with the rules for ethics and plagiarism. We strictly enforce Chalmers rules (in short: never copy other students work (e.g., code, text or images), never copy text or images from other documents (electronical or physical) without proper referencing – it is not a justification to say that you did not know about the rules).