Describing, Predicting, and Mitigating Dissonance Between Alerting Systems

The potential for conflicting information to be transmitted by different automated alerting systems is growing as these systems become more pervasive in process operations. Newly-introduced alerting systems must be carefully designed to minimize the potential for and impact of alerting conflicts (or dissonance), but little is currently available to aid this process. The development of a model of alert dissonance would therefore be beneficial in terms of providing both a theoretical foundation for understanding conflicts and as a practical basis from which specific problems can be addressed. This paper identifies several different types of alerting dissonance that may occur. Using a state-space representation, a generalized model of alerting operation is developed that can be tailored across a variety of applications. Concepts of static and dynamic dissonance are introduced and directly related to the model. A preliminary human factors study is described to illustrate how differences in alert information can translate into reduced operator confidence. An example problem is also presented to demonstrate the application of the state-space model to identify where dissonance may occur and to develop countermeasures to prevent or mitigate conflicts.