Csilla Farkas, Yuliya Kopylova Application Level Protocol for Accident Reconstruction

Motivation There is a critical need to obtain accurate and reliable crash data suitable for accident reconstruction to improve vehicle and highway safety. Until recently, this need was addressed by car manufacturers through equipping vehicles with rudimentary safety systems activated before and during a crash (or near-crash event) recording whether the airbag was properly armed and whether there was a signal to inflate it. The plummeting costs of electronic components allow vehicle manufacturers of nowadays to install much more sophisticated equipment. A modern car contains dozens of microcomputer chips including a central processor, Event Data Recorder (EDR) popularly called “black box”, a GPS receiver, a set of sensors gathering vital components statistics, and several radars. The use of EDR information has proven its potential to profoundly affect both roadside safety and post-accident analysis, which was reflected in regulation issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) enforcing mandatory inclusion of EDRs in vehicles of the latest models [27]. While equipping vehicles with EDRs is undoubtedly a tremendous step in the direction of reliable accident reconstruction, informatio