McHenry Paper published at SAE 2003 World Congress

With a few years of experience under their belts, the new chairmen of the SAE Accident Reconstruction session have revised the 'peer review' process. Their corrections will hopefully include changes to make the SAE 'peer review' process more consistently scientifically sound.  As a sign of our support for changes to the SAE 'peer review' process and with our hope that the changes will be an improvement, we decided to publish at the 2003 SAE International Congress.

The paper we published and presented was:

Abstract:

In prior studies researchers have been interested in automating the process by which the Simulation Model of Automobile Collisions (SMAC) is used to reconstruct an accident. The SMAC program requires an initial approximation of the impact speeds and the positions and orientations at impact. And with a SMAC reconstruction you can sometimes get a reasonably close match and then spend many hours on iterative runs trying to match as best as possible the overall body of physical evidence.

The prior research on automation of SMAC (during the time period 1975-1980) was constrained by computer time and resources. Those research projects were performed on mainframe computers where all applications included charges for CPU time and memory resources. Today with gigahertz Pentium computers and unlimited memory, aside from the initial cost of the computer, the cost per SMAC run is virtually free and the time for a run is measured in seconds rather than minutes.

This paper describes an automatic iterative procedure which can quickly and efficiently iterate to a "best match" of the physical evidence with SMAC. Quantitative measures of the overall "fit" to the evidence, which guide the procedure, are discussed. Representative results from applications to experimental tests are presented.

The SMAC2003 presentation

Information page on SMACITER

paper 2003-01-0486 in PDF Format