Journal of Korean Society of TransportationISSN:1229-1366(Print) 2234-4217(Online)대한교통학회

Various assessment indexes have been developed and utilized to evaluate the driver workload. However, existing workload assessment indexes do not fully reflect driving habits and driving patterns of individual drivers. In addition, there exists significant differences in the amount of workload experienced by a driver and the ability to overcome the driver’s workload. To overcome these limitations associated with existing indexes, this study has developed a novel workload assessment index to reflect an individual driver’s driving pattern. An average of the absolute values ​​of the steering velocity for each driver are set as a threshold value in order to reflect the driving patterns of individual drivers. Further, the sum of the areas of the steering velocities exceeding the threshold value, which is defined as erratic steering area (ESA) in this study, was quantified. The developed ESA index is applied in evaluating the driver workload of manually driven vehicles in automated vehicle platooning environments. Driving simulation experiments are conducted to collect drivers’ responsive behavior data which are used for exploring the relationship between the NASA-TLX score and the ESA by the correlation analysis. As a result, ESA is found to have the greatest correlation with the NASA-TLX score among the various driver workload evaluation indexes in the lane change scenario, confirming the usefulness of ESA.