Advances in Human Aspects of Transportation: Part I

Human Factors and Ergonomics have made a considerable contribution to the research, design, development, operation and analysis of transportation systems which includes road and rail vehicles and their complementary infrastructure, aviation and maritime transportation. This book presents recent advances in the Human Factors aspects of Transportation. These advances include accident analysis, automation of vehicles, comfort, distraction of drivers (understanding of distraction and how to avoid it), environmental concerns, in-vehicle systems design, intelligent transport systems, methodological developments, new systems and technology, observational and case studies, safety, situation awareness, skill development and training, warnings and workload. This book brings together the most recent human factors work in the transportation domain, including empirical research, human performance and other types of modeling, analysis, and development. The issues facing engineers, scientists, and other practitioners of human factors in transportation research are becoming more challenging and more critical. The common theme across these sections is that they deal with the intersection of the human and the system. Moreover, many of the chapter topics cross section boundaries, for instance by focusing on function allocation in NextGen or on the safety benefits of a tower controller tool. This is in keeping with the systemic nature of the problems facing human factors experts in rail and road, aviation and maritime research– it is becoming increasingly important to view problems not as isolated issues that can be extracted from the system environment, but as embedded issues that can only be understood as a part of an overall system.