The University of Birmingham used eye tracking to examine how different operators perform road traffic control tasks and make decisions based on noisy data streams from various sensing technologies and historical data.
Data moves fast in a road traffic control room. How do the operators that keep our streets and highways flowing smoothly process complex information coming from multiple sources simultaneously? Researchers at the University of Birmingham used wearable eye trackers from Tobii Pro to assess the decision-making strategies of traffic control operators as they managed an 'object in the road' task. The results clearly illustrate the value of eye tracking in human factors assessments.
Eye tracking allowed the researchers to directly measure and analyze visual information sampling behavior in the field study. This information is crucial in a road traffic control room because the situational awareness of operators can be deceptive and based on familiarity effects. Eye tracking offers a means of studying and adapting user interfaces to better support more accurate and efficient operator performance.
The study illustrated how human actions within complex environments can be understood using eye tracking metrics based on social network analysis.
When researchers collected all of the gaze data from an operator, they were able to see where the operator focused most of their attention and how it shifted, as shown in the heat map above. It was clear that, in routine tasks, the operator viewed the incident report screen and the map of the road network (as shown by the red centers of the heat maps) and gave less attention to the CCTV feed (and the joystick to control the camera for this feed).
A heat map showing where operators focus their attention.
Control room environment
In this study, researchers used wearable eye trackers from Tobii Pro to study how three operators resolved a simulated 'object in the road' task, requiring information gathering and integration from multiple displays. Control room operators rely on visual information processing facilitated through visual sampling, which was quantified using Tobii Glasses 1.
The results suggest that accommodation of different workflows, respectively multiple visual sampling strategies, may be beneficial in control room
The eye tracking revealed that there is no single workflow in completing the required tasks, rather each individual views