Three-dimensional vehicle dynamics model for road traffic accident simulation and reconstruction

With dynamics theory, a 3-D vehicle dynamics model for road traffic accident simulation and reconstruction was put forward. Through refering to 16 car-to-car impact test datum, the computation error of the 3-D simulation model was defined, and the computation precisions of the 3-D vehicle model and 2-D four-wheel model were compared in quantity. The results of simulation and reconstruction for real traffic accidents show that the general average relative error of the 3-D vehicle model used to compute such the intensive motion as the vehicle impact is 6.65%, and the computation precision of the 3-D model decreases by 1.43% than that of the 2-D model, the proper reduction of computation precision is acceptable because of its advantage in the area of traffic accident type accommodation and visualization.