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Diss. (sammanfattning) Göteborg : Chalmers tekniska högskola, 2024

This thesis ultimately aims to enhance occupant protection by incorporating aspects of realworld crash heterogeneity, often overlooked within current safety assessments. By investigating the effects of crash heterogeneity and broadening the comprehensiveness of occupant safety assessments, it seeks to support the development of more effective future vehicle safety systems. Specifically, the thesis focused on developing and applying methods to incorporate a range of heterogeneity aspects—from crash characteristics to occupant posture, anthropometry, and seat adjustments—into vehicle safety assessments. To predict how crash avoidance systems might change the configurations of the remaining crashes, a method using counterfactual simulations was developed. The use of a novel crash configuration definition, along with a purpose-designed clustering method, reduced the number of predicted crash configurations—while being able to maintain coverage of diverse real-world situations. Three crash configurations were selected to be used in the following studies. Non-nominal sitting postures, body sizes, and seat adjustments can influence the occupant’s response during a crash. These aspects were investigated in simulation studies employing numerical Human Body Models (HBMs) and tailor-made analysis methods. The methods focused on quantifying the influence of these aspects (including interaction effects) on the occupant’s response during a crash. Additionally, techniques were developed to streamline the setup and analysis of numerical experiments using HBMs.