The majority of road traffic accidents which are settled in court use as their basis the report or statement produced by the public order authority acting in each case (in Spain, the Civil Guard and the Regional or Local Police departments ).

The reconstruction of traffic accidents aims to determine the conditions previous to the accidents and put the mechanics of the incident back together again. To do this, we need to know everything about how the accident took place; a mistaken or partial reading of the facts, and thus of the sequence of the accident, leads in many cases to incorrect placing of responsibility. The chance to offer an exact explanation of how the accident took place means that apportioning and assignation of responsibility are far more accurate. The preparation and interpretation of the accident reconstruction is not, however, an easy task: it may require a great number of calculations which hamper the process of the study. To make the calculation stage easier, information technology is a powerful tool for a complex field and provides better development and interpretation of the reconstruction of the accident.

Since 1986, Cesvimap´s technicians have been producing road traffic accident reconstruction reports, whilst developing, in parallel, training work in this field with professional groups concerned with road safety and traffic (expert witnesses and claims assessors, Engineers, Regional or Local Police departments, etc.). Over this time, we have observed that the greatest difficulty facing the technician when putting together a road traffic accident report is the part related to the physical and mathematical calculations which have to be carried out to work out the speeds of the vehicles.

It is also important to be able to explain in a simple way how the accident developed, in order to understand how it came to take place.

With these two premises in mind, Cesvimap has, in conjunction with CIDAUT, the Centre for Research and Development of Automotion, developed a road traffic accident reconstruction IT programme, which aims to make the study of these accidents easier. The programme carries out the speed calculations totally automatically, and allows easy and quick visualization of the accident´s development in two dimensions.

Another important aspect which we have not neglected when designing this programme has been to ensure that it can be used with ease, that data input is simple and speedy, so that a user with basic IT skills can use the programme fully after less than a day.

The hardware requirements for the programme are minimal, since all that is needed is a PC (preferably a Pentium 100 MHz or better), with a minimum of 8MB of RAM and 16 MB available space on the hard disk and a VGA graphic card or higher.

The programme runs with Windows XP/2000 or 9x/Me.