Initial efforts toward identifying aviation alerting system dissonance

The potential for con icting information to be transmitted by different alerting systems is growing as thesesystems become more pervasive in aerospace. Newly introduced alerting systems must be carefully designed tominimizethe potentialforand impactofalerting con icts or dissonance.A methodologyfordissonanceanalysishasbeen developed recently to provide a foundationfor understanding, identifying, and resolving dissonance betweenalerting systems. One area of application of this method is the proliferation of decision-support systems for airtraf c management. With alerts from multiple independently developed alerting systems, pilots and air traf ccontrollers may have dif culty reconciling dissonant alert information. One example application is the recentlyproposed airborne con ict management (ACM) system, which must operate in conjunction with existing traf calert and collision avoidance systems (TCAS). Alerts from ACM should be harmonized with alerts from TCASand vice versa. As a case study, dissonant operating regions for TCAS and ACM are articulated, and it is shownthat in some geometries potentially undesirable TCAS advisories may occur following action taken in response toACM alerts.