journal article·2026-02-12Open access

Emergency Takeover Performance Evaluation of Train Operators in Semi-Automated Urban Rail Transit: An Attention-Enhanced MLP Approach

Hangrui Ji, Yuanchun Huang, Fangsheng Wang, Lin Zhu, Zhigang Liu

Applied Sciences· Volume 16· Issue 4

Abstract

Semi-automated urban rail transit systems still rely on human intervention during safety-critical events, yet emergency takeover performance has received far less attention than in SAE Level-3 road automation. This study focuses on the reaction phase of emergency takeover, defined as the interval from anomaly onset to the train operator’s first control action. We propose a conditional two-stage evaluation framework that jointly assesses event recognition and control execution quality. A simulation-based experiment was conducted to replicate GoA2 operating conditions under controlled emergency scenarios. Three indicators were extracted: (i) event recognition accuracy derived from eye-tracking and retrospective recall, (ii) takeover reaction time, and (iii) initial action accuracy reflecting compliance with operational speed or braking limits. An attention-enhanced multilayer perceptron (MLP) was developed to dynamically weight input features and improve interpretability. The proposed model achieved stable subject-wise performance, with an average accuracy of 0.86 and a macro F1-score of 0.857. These results support the feasibility of interpretable learning-based evaluation for human-in-the-loop safety assessment and provide practical implications for improving operator readiness monitoring and operational safety management in semi-automated metro systems.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Human-Automation Interaction and Safety · Occupational Health and Safety Research · Risk and Safety Analysis

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

School of Urban Railway Transportation, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai 201620, China

Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center of Detection and Assessment for Operation Safety of Railway Transit, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai 201620, China

Funding

Research on behavior pattern and human error of emergency response of multi-functional personnel for fully automatic metro

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