This document represents the final project report for a study entitled "Truck Driver Informational Overload" sponsored by the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association through its Motor Truck Research Committee and associated Operations/Performance Panels. As stated in an initial project statement, the objective of this work was to "provide guidance for developing methods for measuring driving characteristics during information processing tasks." At the start of the project, several different approaches appeared possible given the available time and funding constraints. These options included: (A) conducting a limited number of laboratorylsimulator experiments to collect a variety of different driver-vehicle response data - but, in a simple driving simulator or workstation environment; or, (B) instrumenting a test vehicle and collecting a restricted and somewhat more noisy set of data - but, for a more realistic on-road environment; and lastly, (C) concentrating efforts instead on a comprehensive review of the literature and limiting project activities to planning and making recommendations for a larger-scale future project. Each of these ideas was offered by various interested parties and each had its own merits. Some combination of these three approaches was also possible. Ultimately, the question of emphasis and where limited resources should be applied was asked of the MVMA panel members. The consensus was that a modest literature review should be undertaken in addition to a limited set of simulator-based laboratory experiments using a desktop driving simulator and side-task arrangement. Consequently the contents of this report contain results from two basic project activities: 1) a literature review on multiple task performance and driver information overload, and 2) a description of the driving simulator side-task experiments and a discussion of findings from tests conducted with eight subjects. Lastly, although the term "truck" appears in the project title, the primary focus here was on the driving process and its potential interruption due to side-tasks regardless of the vehicle. However, truck-related applications do appear in some of the references contained in the literature review. Furthermore, a subset of tests conducted in this simulator study (which used a nominal passenger car set of vehicle dynamics in the simulator equations for the baseline vehicle) were repeated with the simulator equations programmed to represent the directional dynamics of a heavy truck in order to check for any sensitivity to vehicle type. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting