Measuring The Time Course of Engineer Workload During Automation Mode Transitions

In current freight railroad operations, locomotive control is shared between the human engineer and automated energy management systems such as GE Trip Optimizer. Transitions between the manual and automatic modes temporarily increase engineer workload above the demands of the current operating situation. Using the average response time and average number of secondary visual attention task stimuli presented as proxy measures of workload, we tracked the time course of workload during the mode transitions for two types of automated control system. The average response times peaked immediately after the mode change. The average number of stimuli presented peaked just before the mode change. We conclude that this technique of measuring workload would be very useful in evaluating future automated systems concepts in a train simulator.