| dc.description.abstract | Due to fast growth of motorized vehicles, driver fatigue is a major cause of accidents on motorways or major roadways and should be a focus of public education regarding the safety of transport. However, this area has been relatively neglected. The driving simulator (DS) has been regarded an effective tool for previewing and assessing new concepts and further constructions. In addition, compared to on-road vehicle test, DS have many advantanges like a safer and controlled environment, and allow the replication of experiment situations. Therefore, a realistic DS is a useful and economical tool employed to explore driver behavior in relation to ITS technologies and to different drivers, vehicles, roads, and environmental situations.
Nevertheless, a high-fidelity DS need many kinds of validated experiments to test and verify its reliability and stability during the development processes, particularly the visual environment. Therefore, the author integrated the validated experiments of visual environment between the on-road test and simulated test. The analytic results clearly indicated that the differences of legibility distances of different objects between driving simulators and real road environments, no matter the objects is traffic sign or braking light. The legibility distances of objects on simulated test all significantly shorter than the field test. Thus, this study proposes a simple algorithm for determining the magnification of a traffic sign for a display system in a simulator. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method of this study can reduce the difference of legibility distances between two different visual environments.
The author also applied DS system to investigate drive fatigue of highway driving. This study quantitatively dertermined the progression of fatigue by means of analyzing several experimental measures. Sleepiness ratings (SSS) and Borg’s category ratio (CR-10) were used to assess impairment of driver alertness and sleepiness experience. Four objective measures, including reaction time testing, physiolofical parameters, fatigue symptoms, and driving performance, were used to determine the fatigue influence of driving safety. Furthermore, several compound indexes were used to assess temporal deterioration of driving ability from alert to fatigued using principal component analysis. The experimental results demonstrated that excessive driving is a potential cause of fatigue-related accidents. Moreover, analytical results indicated that 90 minutes was the safe duration while driving on monotonous highway. Based on the experimental findings, this study provides explicit information of fatigue development and its impact on driving safety that can be used to prevent fatigue-related accidents. | en_US |