Integration of Human Factors in an Automated Driving Supervision System

Abstract: In the field of transport, the reduction in the number of accidents caused by human error is often put forward as an argument in favor for the deployment of autonomous vehicle (Fagnant, & Kockelman, 2015). However, as long as autonomous vehicles are not capable of handling all driving situations, the human operator remains in the control loop and cooperates with the autonomous system (SAE levels 2, 3, and 4 - scale from 0 to 5 where 5 corresponding to the fully autonomous vehicle). The development of supervision systems could be a means to improve safety in these systems, as it has been the case in other transportation modes such as aviation and railways. Indeed, the supervision of autonomous vehicles (e.g.: shuttle fleet) would enable to secure the operation by anticipating incidents (e.g.: support the driver-system relationship, as an air traffic controller would do for pilots), while guaranteeing the reliability (management of system failures) and regularity of the transportation network. However, for Hoc (2000), automation is nevertheless at the origin of a certain number of deleterious effects on the human operator, such as a loss of expertise and adaptability or a lack or excess of confidence in the system, which can lead to errors. Also, human operators can misuse or abuse the automation technology. (Parasuraman and Riley, 1997). Moreover, in this human-machine cooperation, many effects have been observed such as automation bias and complacency phenomena, which can also lead to accidents (Parasuraman & Manzey, 2010).In the perspective of the literature review, we wish to bring keys elements to the designers to create a safe automated driving system. We anticipate this need through the analysis of work activity and creativity. However, autonomous vehicles not representing a mature technology or having applications in the current society. That requires a projection into a future environment and study of the resulting human factors. Prospective ergonomics (Brangier & Robert, 2014) permits to leads us to deploy that. To anticipate the major functions necessary for the future supervision activity, the approach of the “possible future activity” is applied (Daniellou, 1992). This approach studies the reference situations. We identified many sectors of activity with strong similarities with our system such as aviation, railways, bus or nuclear. Until now, four situations were integrated: the supervision of buses and tramways, the civil air traffic control, and the military air traffic control and the autonomous drone in logistics. These reference situations allowed us to identify their strength and weakness around 7 major components of the supervision (safety, infrastructure, hardware, degree of automation, software, organization of the system and human factor). This step builds prerequisites for the creation of the future supervision system. To integrate and adapt them, the next step will be the realization of creativity workshops which will revolve around expert-staff with the objective of proposing a set of specifications for the designers of the main functions to allow the integration of the human factor from the first phases of implementation in this system.

Keywords: Prospective ergonomic, Autonomous véhicule, Supervision

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1002308

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