Abstract
In passive automotive safety, advanced Human Body Models for injury prediction based on the Finite Element (FE) method (e.g. Thums or GHBMC families) have the potential to represent the population variability and to provide more accurate injury predictions than alternatives using global injury criteria. However, these advanced HBMs are underutilised in industrial R&D. Possible reasons include difficulties to position the models - which are typically only available in one posture - in actual vehicle environments, and the limited representation of the population variability (size, weight, limited availability for specific populations such as children, etc.). As the models and methodologies to use them are not standardized or widely shared, research achievements have been slow to result into safety benefits for the whole community. The main objective of the PIPER project was to develop user friendly tools to position and personalize these advanced HBMs, and to share them widely with the community. By facilitating the generation of population and subject-specific HBMs and their usage in production environments, the PIPER tools will enable new industrial R&D applications for the design of restraint systems as well as in research. After a specification phase to which the community could participate, the project developed an Open Source software framework to facilitate the positioning and personalizing of human body models for safety. The framework can be used with the leading HBMs and, because of its modularity, it could be further extended by users. It already provides many modules developed by the partners including state of the art real time simulation techniques for positioning, advanced morphing techniques to match various population dimensions, or smoothing approaches. The project also developed a new Open Source child model which can be used to describe children of age between 1.5 and 6 years during impacts and interactions with child restraint systems. The model performance has been extensively checked against and the model has its own dedicated module in the PIPER framework to facilitate the age change. Other project results included the development of generic car environments to facilitate comparisons and future work on accident reconstructions, and various software tools and geometrical datasets. A first evaluation was performed within the project through a few crash applications that were selected for their safety relevance. Performed by both industrial and academic partners, these included among others pedestrian to generic vehicle impact, postural changes due emergency manoeuvres (pre-crash) followed by a crash and child accident reconstructions. Scaling and/or positioning were performed in each application and adult models from the GHBMC and Thums families were used besides the PIPER child model. The results demonstrated the usability and the potential of the software and child model. Most results were documented in tutorials for future users. After selecting open source licenses, the PIPER framework and child model were first released at the final workshop of the project on April 25, 2017. Numerous academic and industrial users had already raised their interest during the project and provided useful inputs at various dissemination events and the workshop was well attended by both industry and academia. The initiation of an Open source project (www.piperproject. org) to continue promote the PIPER's vision and results beyond the end of the EU project was also announced at the workshop. Links to the project results, documentation, and other information can be found on the Open Source project Website.