Vehicle SPEed Evaluation and Dynamics Assessment (V-SPEED)

Vehicles can be easily used as a weapon in terrorist attacks, because they are simple to obtain and require little experience and preparation in handling. JRC research on Hostile Vehicle Mitigation focuses on several aspects, including supporting stakeholders to assess the threat. Therefore, the JRC has developed a tool automatically assessing the maximum speed of vehicles on approach roads towards public spaces. This supports the logic of a Vehicle Dynamics Assessment (VDA) as a first step in the mitigation of vehicle as a weapon attacks.  

What are the main features? 

The tool is based on data from OpenStreetMap. Following the user’s selection of an area of interest, e.g. a pedestrian area or a square hosting an event, the application will retrieve the surrounding street network and determine intersection points with the selected area. It will calculate the approach speed at these intersection points based on the vehicle starting speed, its acceleration ratio and street geometry variables, particularly the street width.  

The application’s automatic mode allows identifying the most critical approach paths towards the selected area of interest. The increasing approach speed is visualized through a colour code and displayed for all street segment and intersection points. 

A manual mode allows fine-tuning results and investigating a specific approach path in more detail.  

While this does not replace a more detailed Vehicle Dynamics Assessment, it can support it and provide a quick, preliminary assessment.  

The configuration selected by the user (area of interest, vehicle and street network parameters) can be saved and reimported for complementary assessments at a later stage. 

How to export results? 

A report function allows exporting the calculation results as a PDF file. The user can customize the description of the area of interest. The report presents different approach roads as separate pages. See hereunder for an example of the report structure. 

How to learn more about the underlying concept and the tool’s functionalities? 

A tutorial video explains the key features. To get familiar with the tool’s features and the complexity of involved parameters, we suggest consulting it.  

In addition, you can dive into more detail in the related JRC Technical Report.  

How to get access? Software as a Service

JRC E.3 offers access to this tool to interested stakeholders on a need-to-know basis. Access requests with proper justification can be made here. 

We offer access to our tools following a ‘Software as a Service (SaaS) approach’, making it easy and convenient for authorized users to access them whenever needed, without worrying about compatibility, installation, maintenance, or other constraints.  

Controlled access is conveniently provided via the ‘EU Login’ account. 

What are the next steps? 

We do not stop here as we are already working on new features, trying to improve the underlying calculation algorithm further and adding kinetic energy values of the situations investigated. This will be part of a future release.