Study On The Effect Of Driving Information Load To Road Traffic Safety In Highway Ramp Area

Accidents which happened in highway ramp area hold a large proportion in thetotal highway accident quantity in our country, soitmakes big sense toimprove thesafety of highway ramp area to the safety level of the highway. Research have pointedout that90%highway accidents caused by human factors, but41.4%of the accidents’drivers had no obvious illegal recordor subjective errors, but all because of the driversfailed to cognitive the external environmentcorrectly. Due to the complexity ofenvironmental informationand fast speed of the highway ramp area, drivers alwayshave no enough time to recognize traffic signs or caused wrong judgment or drivingerrors which always affect the traffic safety in this area. In a word, it had caused highdriving ifromation load in highway ramp areas and affect traffic safetygreatly.Physiological and psychological measurement technologies wereused inthisthesisto study the driving workload of ramp area and analyze the influence ofdifferent workload levelto traffic safety.First of all, used the perspective of information theory to calculate theinformation contained by road traffic sign, and divided the information into fourlevels. Driving information load experiments weredesigned and carried out based onE-prime software and NeuroScan EEG data acquisition system. Twentyfourparticipantswere recruited to take part in this experiment.Driving behavior dataand EEG data were collected to analyze the difference between traffic signinformation levels.The results show that the reaction times for different informationlevelsaresignificant different, and it’shighly relevant for subjective workload gradeand theoryinformation level, from this we could know that information level can beused as an index to control driving informationload. According to the results of EEGdata for adjacent grade information,significant differencesfor subjects’ brainwavecomposition were not found.Thecomposition percentages ofbeta and delta waveschange significantly for traffic signs underinformation levelof A, C and B, D.Secondly,for further study thedriving workloadcharacteristicsof highway ramp area, we had designed and carried out highway ramp driving workload experimentunder simulation driving scenarios.Driving simulation platform, Equivital EQSEMphysiological data acquisition device, and EEG acquisition system were used inthis experiment to get different types data.The vehicle running data, subjectiveworkload evaluation data were also acquired during the experiment.The data Analysisshowed that the participants’ speed control ability for vehicleweakenedin the area ofthe highway ramp. The reaction time for traffic signs was significantly affects by thespeed in the experiment, and it’s lager than the reaction time which got in the staticexperiment, the margin was about1second within same informationlevel.Physiological data result showed that theheart rate of the participants changesmore intensewhen the sign information level increases. HRV can be used as asensitive index of the workload, but there was no significant difference betweeninformation level B and C. EEG data showed that there was no significant differencefor braincomposition waves under different information levels.When it comes to thedifferent waves combined together, the result shows that it fitted well betweensigninformation and brain waves; this indicated that there have some relationshipsbetween brain waves and visual cognition load.Finally, the security of the rampwas divided into four levels, and the relationshipbetween safeties and speed difference was also analyzed, lateral offset and visualcognition timebased on the simulated driving data.In order to analysis the safety usingdifferent evaluation factors, weight method was use in this thesis. Weighting factormethod was used to determine the weights of various parameters, and according tothe calculation results, the comprehensivesafety evaluation of ramp area was made.