Eye-Movement Analysis of Track Monitoring Patterns of Night Train Operators: Effects of Geographic Knowledge and Fatigue

Abstract

Track maintenance is one of the most critical activities for railway safety, particularly for high-speed trains. In maintaining tracks, a number of special purpose trains are used for materials transportation, inspection of the track and rails, construction and other purposes. These track maintenance trains are operated under stressful and changing conditions such as the lack of traffic signals and low visibility. Therefore, it is of great importance to investigate train operators' human factors for enhancement of their operation quality and reliability. The present paper particularly focuses on their geographic knowledge on driving area and fatigue by time course as such factors. Through task analysis using eye-tracking data recorded during performance of track inspection task, several analytical diagrams were produced: transition network of attention allocation, distribution of eye-gaze duration at each location on the ground and surroundings, and so forth. Based on these results, we examine the effects of the train operator's human factors on their cognitive and perceptual processes, and also discuss the operator's strategy for obstacle detection on the track.