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Vehicle automation and drivers: The interaction safety case

Date and Time: Tuesday, July 11, 2023: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Rino Brouwer 

Senior Advisor Human Factors and Automated Driving, Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management

Presentation Description

In the last decades human beings have been portrayed as the weak link in avoiding traffic accidents. Often it has been reported that 90+% of all accidents are caused by human error. This makes sense since so far humans have been responsible for the driving task, meaning that there is hardly anyone else to blame. So taking the human out of the safety equation must bring the number of accidents down. However new risks may be introduced by vehicle automation.

The main focus of the safety assessment of automated vehicles is on avoiding collisions. In automated vehicles that can or need to be driven by users (human beings) these users have to be taken into account. Helping the user doing the right thing is an important part of safe use of automated vehicles and should therefore be part of the safety assessment.

Speaker Biography

Together with my colleagues of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and colleagues of the RDW (the type approval authority in the Netherlands) I represent the Dutch government in different UNECE groups to ensure that the user needs with respect to vehicle automation are taken into account. In short we aim to introduce Human Factors in legislation with respect to vehicle automation. When there is still an option for a user to drive an automated vehicle we believe that helping the user to be able to do the 'right thing through informing and supporting that user is safety relevant and needs to be part of the entire safety case of such automated vehicles. Besides that I initiate research on how Human Factors related questions can be tested within a type approval process. Before working for the ministry I worked for 20 years as a behavioural researcher and human factors specialist at TNO with continuous involvement in national, international, and commercial projects on the effects of infrastructure on driving behaviour or the effects of in-vehicle systems on driving behaviour. We used driving simulators and instrumented vehicles for our research. And when the world was even younger I did my PhD at the Leiden University on visual information processing and selection.

Presentation File