Failure prediction for advanced crashworthiness of transportation vehicles

This report describes a proposal for a quality assurance system for road safety in road design and management. The report is the result of various SWOV activities in the field of quality care in the multi-year research programme 2007-2010. The early chapters are an account of these earlier activities. Chapter 1 discusses the concepts quality and quality assurance and how they relate to road safety. Chapter 1 also goes into the three aspects that are important for quality assurance in road safety: the availability of knowledge, the presence of guidelines and manuals that are based on this knowledge, and their correct application by those involved. This report especially discusses the latter topic and will therefore focus on road safety expertise, the manner of applying (or deviating from) the guidelines, and embedding road safety in the work processes. Chapter 2 discusses quality assurance in theory and in practice. This chapter is based on an implementation of a system for quality assurance in working processes of (provincial) road authorities. This procedure leans heavily on the PDCA cycle (PLAN, DO, CHECK, ACT). The proposal involves going through the PDA cycle in every design phase and to specifically paying attention to the quality assurance tools that can be used in the CHECK phase. The proposed procedure was discussed in a broad consultation among seven provincial road authorities (Chapter 4). The interviews that were held confirm the picture that arose in earlier phases of the project. The persons who were interviewed indicate that in their opinion road safety is secured because manuals and guidelines are followed and because experts are doing the job. However, the process is not transparent if anything unexpectedly does go wrong, e.g. in the involvement of a road safety expert, or if the manuals and guidelines are deviated from, it is impossible to trace in which phase of the project the cause can be found. In Chapter 5 recommendations are therefore made to improve this process. The improvements are related to the points of interest that were introduced in Chapter 1: the expertise of the persons involved, the application of manuals and guidelines, and the embedding of road safety in the work processes.