UCSC– Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – takes part in the SIMUsafe project with a team composed of traffic psychologists, from the Traffic Unit Research.  

The UCSC aim in SIMUsafe is the analysis of human factor and of behavioral aspects for safer transport in traffic simulation. This is possible using the SORC model analysis that provides the guidelines for the behavioural assessment and intervention strategy based on the analysis performed.  
The acronym SORC is for:  

• Stimuli, based on road context, external condition and road condition. For example, for cars and motorbike the main interest is about roundabout; for pedestrian are crosswalks located at intersections and on straight roads. Differently, for bicycles the focus is on maneuvers. This data was collected with video analysis.  
• Organism, this term is referred to driver’s profile and user’s status. Data from cognitive assessment and personality test are collected to generate the user’s profile. Instead, user’s status, could be define in term of vigilance and emotion. For example, vigilance is influenced by distraction, in term of divide attention between driving or walking and social activities, as talking with the passengers, or checking the mobile phone.  
• Response, based on user’s performance in terms on behaviours (number of violations) and motivation, collected with the Self Confrontation Interviewees  
• Consequences are risk events (near miss or crash) and potential risk. Risk events could be considered as risk evaluation about environment, behaviours or subjective risk perception.  

To achieve this, various instruments are used. An important role is covered by video analysis. This kind of analysis is performed by expert psychologists to detect and classify risky events, to perform a microanalysis of the users’ behaviour, to observe the interaction between such behaviour and the environmental condition. For example, with this integrated analysis is possible to identify if a medium risk situation could be linked with a distraction or violations. These data are also integrated with the Self-Confrontation Interviews. The SCI aim is to integrate the risk evaluation from the drivers’ subjective point of view.