Abstract
Advanced road traffic management systems provide numerous opportunities for the application of sophisticated computer visualization concepts. The operating staff in a traffic control center are required to assimilate large quantities of incoming data in order to determine the real state of traffic flow and congestion. Part of the incoming data relates to vehicular speed and density, and is often not subjected to sufficient pre-processing before presentation in tabular form on a video display terminal (VDT). Improvements in the format of the tabular information are therefore worthy of investigation. A traffic control simulation experiment was conducted to examine how human subjects extract information from VDT data presented in several different formats. Subjects were asked to respond to exceptional values which occurred randomly in tabular columns of frequently changing data. Their accuracy and reaction time were measured for data columns which were sorted or unsorted, and for data which was presented either numerically or color-coded. Analysis of the results suggests that both sorting and color-coding are significant in reducing response time, and that color-coding is appreciably more effective in this regard.
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