Title: Acceptance criteria for validation metrics in roadside safety based on repeated full-scale crash tests
Authors: Mario Mongiardini, Malcolm H. Ray, Marco Anghileri
Addresses: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA 01609, USA. ' Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA 01609, USA. ' Department of Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, via La Masa 34, Milan 20156, Italy
Abstract: This paper proposes acceptance criteria for quantitative comparison metrics to be applied in the Verification and Validation (V&V) process of computational models used in roadside safety. Typically, the degree of verification or validation of a numerical model is assessed by qualitatively comparing the shapes of two curves, but qualitative comparisons are subjective and open to interpretation. Using quantitative comparison metrics in the V&V process allows for an objective measure of the reliability of a numerical model. Two comparison metrics were selected from a group of 16 metrics found in the literature. Acceptance criteria suitable to the typical scatter of full-scale crash tests were established by comparing ten essentially identical vehicle redirectional crash tests. Since the tests were as identical as can be achieved experimentally, the values of the quantitative metrics represented the reasonable range for the metric corresponding to matched experiments. Typical residual errors expected in full-scale tests are also discussed.
Keywords: verification; validation; V&V; comparison metrics; full-scale crash tests; numerical simulation; roadside safety; computational modelling; model reliability.
International Journal of Reliability and Safety, 2010 Vol.4 No.1, pp.69 - 88
Received: 05 Dec 2008
Accepted: 22 May 2009
Published online: 30 Nov 2009 *