Change of drivers’ functional condition during dangerous goods transportation

Abstract

The study of the human factors in traffic safety is a relatively young scientific field that began to develop several decades before the mass car advent. The origins of transport psychology and psychophysiology were mostly aimed at creating more comfortable and safe driving conditions due to the design of highways. Over time, there was a need to take into account drivers working conditions, namely the ergonomics of vehicles. The latest works have already taken into account previous experience and considered the issues of freight and passenger transportation technological processes, including the human factor. Among the objects and subjects of research in previous works were considered the processes of driving vehicles with different ergonomic characteristics and buses of different capacities, which created a kind of case matrix for planning experiments. When it comes to trucks, the matrix of cases became much larger, as the set of ergonomic and dynamic features of vehicles adds a much wider set of specialization of cargo and truck types. In this case, the most important issue is to determine the road conditions impact the driver's functional condition, engaged in the transport of dangerous goods, which is the purpose of this article. The research used: methods of field survey to establish the values of traffic flow on highways; methods of in-house research to determine the value of road capacity; electrophysiological methods to determine changes in the driver's functional condition. The article describes the typing of road conditions according to their complexity, as well as the differentiation of drivers according to their psychological and professional qualities. Experimental studies of changes in driver's functional state of different age and socionic groups with different road conditions complexity, during dangerous goods transportation (second class of risk). The main results indicate that the analysis of traffic conditions' impact on the driver's functional state shows different dynamics of psycho-emotional stress change for people characterized by certain types of the nervous system and the ratio of their age to work experience.