Steering a Driving Simulator Using the Queueing Network-model Human Processor (qn-mhp)

The Queueing Network-Model Human Processor (QN-MHP) is a computational architecture that combines the mathematical theories and simulation methods of queueing networks (QN) with the symbolic and procedure methods of GOMS analysis and the Model Human Processor (MHP). QN-MHP has been successfully used to model reaction time tasks and visual search tasks (Feyen and Liu, 2001a,b). This paper describes our work of using QN-MHP to model vehicle steering and to steer a driving simulator as a step toward modeling more complex driving scenarios. The steering model was implemented in Promodel, a commercially available simulation program. A network of 20 servers represents different functional modules of the human perceptual, cognitive, and motor information processing system. Entities carrying information on vehicle location and orientation arrive at and flow through the visual, cognitive and motor sub-networks of the system and are processed independently and concurrently by the servers.