Study on comprehensive evaluation method of mental workload level

Abstract Mental workload has an important impact on the human performance of ship operators. The purpose of this study is to develop an evaluation method to evaluate the ship operator’s mental workload. First, an evaluation index system was constructed, and the DEMATEL (decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory) method was used to determine the relative weight of each index. Then, the fuzzy evaluation method was used to calculate the mental workload of ship operator based on the evaluation value and relative weight of indexes. The evaluation result of the developed method showed that the ship operators’ mental workload were 3.78 and 2.99 under tasks 1 and 2, and the ship operators’ mental workloads were at the ‘very high’ and ‘high’ levels based on the maximum membership principle. Also, the evaluation result of the developed method was consistent with the evaluation results of subjective mental workload assessment technique. It proves that the developed method can effectively evaluate the ship operator’s mental workload level.