Models of Vehicular Collision: Development and Simulation with Emphasis on Safety V: MEDUSA: Theory, Examples, User's Manual, Programmer's Guide and Code

This document constitutes a final report for MOU 39. It contains a User's Manual, Programmer's Guide, source code and underlying theory for the program MEDUSA. This program is capable of simulating both the normative driving dynamics and collision dynamics of an arbitrary number of vehicles. Its range of validity lies in the assumed nature of the vehicular collision, and it is recommended for use in studying low relative velocity impact scenarios at large time-scales. Keywords: IVHS America, Vehicle Dynamics, Collision Dynamics, Safety, computer Simluation, Animal and Simulation; A significant portion of this report is devoted to the vehicle and road models, the former composed of tire, collision, suspension and sprung mass models, augmented by a collision detector algorithm. The road model is sufficiently general to encompass variations in banking and sloping of highways. The report also contains the simulation results of several representative vehicular collision scenarios. These results are supplemented by the input files for MEDUSA and the visualization program SMARTPATH. Several features of these examples are also discussed in light of the improvements to MEDUSA that they motivated.