The Role of Fatigue and Stress in Transportation

Fatigue and stress represent critical yet often overlooked threats to safety across all modes of transportation. From aviation incidents linked to pilot exhaustion to rail accidents caused by operator overload, these human performance challenges continue to claim lives and compromise system integrity. As the transportation landscape evolves with the introduction of eVTOL aircraft, Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) platforms, and increasingly autonomous systems, operators are transitioning from active controllers to supervisors of automation which is altering cognitive demands and creating fatigue exposure profiles that current regulations struggle to address. These shifts demand a unified and evidence-based approach to understanding and managing the human performance risks that span aviation, maritime, rail, road freight, and emerging mobility sectors.

The Role of Fatigue and Stress in Transportation: A Human-Centric Transportation Safety Approach delivers multi-modal examination of transportation fatigue and stress management, integrating operational realities with psychological science, regulatory requirements, and emerging technologies. Across these chapters, the volume explores the theoretical foundations of fatigue science, the regulatory frameworks of EASA, FAA, and UK CAA, and the practical implementation of Fatigue Risk Management Systems (FRMS). It examines critical operational challenges including single-pilot operations, wearable physiological monitoring, and the use of eye-tracking systems as real-time indicators of cognitive fatigue and attention failure. The book also confronts the ethical, legal, and social dimensions of deploying monitoring technologies in professional settings and addresses workforce consent, data privacy, algorithmic transparency, and the trust-building measures essential for regulatory compliance and operational acceptance. Readers will gain a complete framework for designing, implementing, and governing fatigue and stress interventions that protect both human operators and the systems they manage.

This book is essential reading for aviation and transportation safety professionals, human factors specialists, regulatory authorities, occupational health practitioners, and graduate students in aviation management, transportation safety, human factors engineering, and related disciplines.