Centre of Excellence for Road Safety

The Centre of Excellence for Road Safety (CoERS) at IIT Madras is an ecosystem for bringing the best practices of road safety to the Country and in establishing leadership at the trijunction of academia, industry, and the Government. The Centre will function as a think tank for the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) in bringing together the best practices in road safety, developing systems and provide data-driven advisory for all stakeholders and the public.

Working towards achieving a goal of reducing road crash fatalities by 50 per cent by 2030 and then to zero fatalities by 2040, it is important to establish a robust system enabling quality data collection, incremental improvements in the state and implementation of data-driven policies for the transportation system across all domains of engineering (vehicle and road), enforcement, emergency care, education, and empathy (Human Factors in Engineering Design).

The CoERS is intended to operate as a state-of-the-art research centre bringing together domain experts. The primary focus of CoERS will be on human factors applied in vehicle safety, from both occupant and pedestrian perspectives. The CoERS will also be working on improving road engineering, enforcement, and trauma care. The Centre will work with Government, industry, and institutions to bring an evidence-based structured approach to road safety. In addition to the various products and processes that will be developed, it will advise the policy makers and lead advocacy across stakeholders to improve road safety.

Several projects and research to build process, analytical, software or hardware solutions incorporating all the recent advancements made in working towards the common vision of bringing down deaths and injuries from road traffic crashes will be undertaken by the Centre.

Research opportunities at the Centre will be in vehicle engineering, driver health, behaviour and performance, crash data analytics, enforcement, socio-economic costing, engagement with road safety stakeholders for capacity and capability improvements, and policy advisory. The main outcome is towards establishing a co-creating ecosystem that can drive initiatives to bring about mindset and behavioural changes, strategy for formulating and deployment of road safety initiatives, new product/ process and technology development, research and publications.