Search

Nautical traffic management in The Netherlands is shifting from local traffic control to corridor traffic management. Current traffic management systems do not sufficiently support operators in perceptual and cognitive process to interpret and understand the large amounts of information needed for corridor traffic management. Newly developed user interface concepts aim to overcome deficiencies of current interface designs that insufficiently support situation awareness assessment. The effects of these new user interfaces, however, are insufficiently known due to the intricate relations between situation awareness, task performance, and workload. The objective of this study is to evaluate the effects of the three previously developed user interface concepts on operators' situation awareness, task performance, and workload to gain better insights into the benefits and limitations of the user interface design concepts. The effects were tested in a simulator environment. The results show that user interface features of an integrated user interface allowed operators to apply more effective information processing, which resulted in better task performance. Features of a context-dependent adaptable user interface triggered proactive behavior of operators, which resulted in better task performance for tasks in which operators require insight into future activities of the elements in the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Netherlands is a densely populated country. As a result environmental issues related to road traffic are taken very serious. This paper discusses the mechanistic design of porous asphalt surface mixtures, PA. The environmental advantages of PA are that it dramatically reduces traffic noise. A disadvantage of PA is that the presence of pores reduces the strength of the mixture which is reflected in the materials vulnerability to ravelling. And, to make matters worse, the open structure makes the material vulnerable to aging which further enhances the ravelling vulnerability. Ravelling has a negative effect on noise emission, implying that the main advantage of PA is gradually lost as the development of ravelling damage progresses throughout the service life of PA. Furthermore ravelling of PA is the main reason for PA maintenance. In this paper a mechanistic mixture design approach for PA surfacings and open graded thin surfacings is discussed. The procedure is based on meso scale material mechanics in which the in-mixture response to wheel loadings is simulated and used for further durability determination. The development of the theory summarised and the paper comes to a conclusion by validation of the procedure on the basis of full-scale ravelling tests. It is concluded that the mechanistic design of silent porous surfacing layers is feasible today and that this may well contribute to the introduction of durable and silent road surfacings on a wider scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]