The high potential for injury involved in rollover accidents warrants the development of a system to protect passengers against such events. To effectively implement such a protection system, it is first necessary to determine rollover criteria (i.e., real time states which indicate the occurrence of rollover events). In this paper, several rollover criteria have been developed based on simplified physical models. Such accidents are first classified into two types, untripped and tripped, according to the main cause that initiates the rollover. Characteristics of these rollover situations are identified by applying appropriate principles of dynamics to corresponding simplified physical models. Two main rollover criteria, Rotational Kinetic Energy (RKE) and Initial Kinetic Energy (IKE), are then introduced based on these characteristics. ADAMS/View simulations have been performed to verify the feasibility of the introduced rollover criteria. ADAMS/Car simulations have also been conducted to get more realistic rollover data with a complete vehicle model. Results of these experiments reveal that our established criteria prove useful for predicting whether actual rollover occurs or not.