Situational Awareness in the Context of Automated Driving - Adapting the Situational Awareness Global Assessment Technique

Automated vehicles offer the opportunity to disengage from the driving task, though in SAE Level 3 vehicles a Take-Over Request (TOR) can occur at any time. In this case, the driver must quickly assess the situation and completely take over the driving task. In order for the driver to be able to do this safely, the rapid development of sufficient situational awareness is of particular importance. To investigate how this can be supported, it is necessary to find a sufficiently accurate method for measuring situational awareness in the context of automated driving. The Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT) provides an objective, direct method for measuring all three levels of situation awareness. However, in previous applications of the method, the relevance of the information measured by the SAGAT method was not taken into account. The aim of this paper is therefore to first identify suitable SAGAT questions by means of a literature review and then to assess the relevance of the information asked for the safe takeover of vehicle control by an online questionnaire (n = 78). Subsequently, a study in a driving simulator (n = 32) will test whether a weighted evaluation of the SAGAT questions according to the classification by the online questionnaire can further optimize the method for measuring situation awareness.