Ex ante assessment of safety issues of new technologies in transport

New technologies in traffic can produce a range of unknown and unplanned deviations which require attention when assessing such technologies for market implementation. Current assessment methods focus on expected and usually desired effects and do not include identification and analyses of all kinds of other effects resulting from processes other than the desired processes. In this paper a method called HAZOP (Hazard and Operability analysis), originally developed for identifying unintended safety problems in chemical processes, is introduced and applied in order to analyse the added value of this method for large scale pilots with intelligent transport systems. The paper discusses the additional potential safety problems which the HAZOP identifies, that should be analysed before implementation of intelligent speed adaptation in daily traffic can be considered.