Accelerations of public transport vehicles: A method to derive representative generic pulses for passenger safety testing

Abstract

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Investigating the postural balance and stability of standing passengers of public transport in laboratory or numerical tests requires generic test pulses, which replicate the acceleration/deceleration characteristics of common public transport vehicles such as buses or trams. We propose a method to generate such test pulses based on measured acceleration time series. The method consists of an automated splitting algorithm, an expansion in Legendre polynomials and a weighted mean to obtain average pulses which are not dominated by the events of highest magnitude. As a demonstration, the method is applied to acceleration time series obtained on public buses in normal operation, resulting in scalable generic pulse shapes. These can be used as the basis of a standardised framework for physical and virtual testing addressing the standing passenger problem.

Keywords

• public transport
• non-collision incidents
• acceleration time series
• legendre polynomials
• generic acceleration pulses