Situation awareness on the road: review, theoretical and methodological issues, and future directions

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the concept of situation awareness (SA) has received significant attention in most safety critical domains. One notable omission is the area of road safety, where relatively little research has been conducted to date. This article presents a review of road transport-related SA research applications and discusses, from a theoretical and methodological viewpoint, issues requiring clarification in this context. In particular, we attempt to identify the most appropriate theoretical and methodological position in order to drive future road transport-related applications, and pinpoint key areas requiring investigation. We argue that the key to integrated solutions is to take a systems approach as advocated by protagonists of distributed SA, which considers infrastructure, road environment, vehicles and vehicle technology as well as pedestrians, drivers and vulnerable road users together. The implications of this for future research directions are then discussed and a series of key lines of future enquiry are articulated.

Keywords:

• situation awareness
• road safety
• systems approach
• drivers
• situation awareness measurement

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of Dr Paul M. Salmon's current Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) post-doctoral training, Public Health Fellowship. The on-road study referred to within this article was funded by the Commonwealth of Australia, through the Cooperative Research Centre for Advanced Automotive Technology, Finally, the authors would like to thank Dr Michael Lenné for commenting on an earlier draft and also the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve this article.