A genetic algorithm approach to best scenarios selection for performance evaluation of vehicle active safety systems

Abstract

Gholamjafari, Ali MSECE, Purdue University, May 2015. A Genetic Algorithm Approach to Best Scenarios Selection for Performance Evaluation of Vehicle Active Safety Systems . Major Professor: Dr. Lingxi Li. One of the most crucial tasks for Intelligent Transportation Systems is to enhance driving safety. During the past several years, active safety systems have been broadly studied and they have been playing a significant role in vehicular safety. Pedestrian Pre- Collision System (PCS) is a type of active safety systems which is used toward pedestrian safety. Such system utilizes camera, radar or a combination of both to detect the relative position of the pedestrians towards the vehicle. Based on the speed and direction of the car, position of the pedestrian, and other useful information, the systems can anticipate the collision/near-collision events and take proper actions to reduce the damage due to the potential accidents. The actions could be triggering the braking system to stop the car automatically or could be simply sending a warning signal to the driver depending on the type of the events. We need to design proper testing scenarios, perform the vehicle testing, collect and analyze data to evaluate the performance of PCS systems. It is impossible though to test all possible accident scenarios due to the high cost of the experiments and the time limit. Therefore, a subset of complete testing scenarios (which is critical due to the different types of cost such as fatalities, social costs, the numbers of crashes, etc.) need to be considered instead. Note that selecting a subset of testing scenarios is equivalent to an optimization problem which is maximizing a cost function while satisfying a set of constraints. In this thesis, we develop an approach based on Genetic Algorithm to solve such optimization problems. We then utilize crash and field database to validate the accuracy of our algorithm. We show that our method is effective and robust, and runs much faster than exhaustive search algorithms. We also present some crucial testing scenarios as the result of our approach, which can be used in PCS field testing.