Mariano Chóliz Montañés

On the concept and measurement of driver drowsiness, fatigue and inattention: implications for countermeasures

This paper focuses on the concepts of drowsiness, fatigue and inattention and the objective measurement of these processes while driving a vehicle. The major aim is to point to factors that are important in order to develop effective countermeasures against these human problems, including systems that continuously assess the drivers state and the quality of driving, which record online biobehavioural data of the driver and vehicle-based performance data. A selection of recent works on the effectiveness of the various types of countermeasures being studied is provided. Finally, problems that affect most of the research in these fields are noted.

CAR FOLLOWING TECHNIQUES: THE ROLE OF THE HUMAN FACTOR RECONSIDERED

Engineering and psychophysiological car following models emerge in the late 1950s (Saifuzzaman & Zheng, 2014). Such models differ in their ground concepts and explanatory mechanisms, but both assume a fundamental tenet: following each other, drivers invariably attempt to couple, keeping safety distance. More recent models focus on the spontaneous emergence of traffic jams that results from the properties of a system of interacting vehicles (i.e., without bottlenecks). In an experimental setting Sugiyama et al., (2008) have successfully recreated the conditions that allow the observation of the typical soliton wave going backwards through several car clusters. When certain speed, density and inter-vehicular distance join, so do traffic jams. Some of us have built upon these and other factors (e.g., wave movement in nature) exploring the mathematical properties of a system with three incognita that also needs three variables to be solved (Melchor & Sanchez, 2014). Two canonical car-following techniques emerge as a consequence: Driving to keep safety Distance (DD) vs Inertia (DI). Also a basic question: can drivers actually understand and follow either way, or do they stick to a basic normative driving behavior? This paper summarizes the results after three experimental studies done with a driving simulator. Several performance measures from individual drivers (accelerations, decelerations, average speed, distance to leader, and so on) were taken. As an overall indicator, results consistently announce in the three studies that DI trips consume less fuel (about 20%) than DD ones. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/CIT2016.2016.3406