Towards a better understanding of vulnerability in pedestrian-vehicle collision

The road is a transport infrastructure intended for the movement of users, such as vehicles and pedestrians. These interact with each other following rules that guarantee safety and security. Unfortunately, however, traffic safety does not depend solely on compliance with the rules but is affected by a series of factors, such as inattention by users or malfunctioning due to a particular environmental condition, etc. Although the accident data in Italy show a reduction in the mortality of motorists, thanks to the new onboard technologies, an increase in the number of victims among pedestrians is observed. To increase the safety of vulnerable users, several projects have been developed in order to define the correlation between the severity of the accident, the response of the vehicle and the stresses that can be tolerated without serious risks to the occupant's life. However, this requires detailed accident and user injury data. Often without this information, it is not possible to predict the accident situations of a site and the related consequences. The aim of this study is to enrich the existing vulnerability functions by correlating the objective kinematic parameters (acceleration, speed, etc.) with user injuries through multi-body simulations.