Initial efforts toward identifying aviation alerting system dissonance

The potential for conflicting information to be transmitted by different alerting systems is growing as these systems become more pervasive in aerospace. Newly introduced alerting systems must be carefully designed to minimize the potential for and impact of alerting conflicts or dissonance. A methodology for dissonance analysis has been developed recently to provide a foundation for understanding, identifying, and resolving dissonance between alerting systems. One aria of application of this method is the proliferation! of decision-support systems for air traffic management. With alerts from multiple independently developed alerting systems, pilots and air traffic controllers may have difficulty reconciling dissonant alert information. One example application is the recently proposed airborne conflict management (ACM) system, which must operate in conjunction with existing traffic alert and collision avoidance systems (TCAS). Alerts from ACM should be harmonized with alerts from TCAS and vice versa. As a case study, dissonant operating regions for TCAS and ACM are articulated, and it is shown that in some geometries potentially undesirable TCAS advisories may occur following action taken in response to ACM alerts.