A simulation environment for evaluation of Integrated Alerting and Notification (IAN) concepts

In order to pursue solutions that simultaneously increase the flight crew´s ability to avoid, detect, and recover from unexpected events while also providing countermeasures to pilot error, an onboard Hazard and Integrity Monitor (HIM) function as well as an Integrated Alerting and Notification (IAN) function have previously been proposed to detect and assess hazards, and issue integrated and prioritized alerts and notifications to the flight crew. The objective of these functions is to mitigate hazards introduced by the operators, the application of automation, and the environment. This paper presents a simulation environment developed for verification and validation of the HIM and IAN concepts. This simulation environment models aircraft communication, navigation, surveillance, and health reporting systems and sensors, along with their respective error models. The environment allows for test and evaluation of HIM and IAN concepts under varying sensor and data link configurations and can easily be interface with human-in-the-loop simulators as well. Because of its flexibility of the onboard avionics configurations, this simulation environment can also be used to test other new avionics sensors and algorithms. This paper will discuss the functionality of this simulation environment including avionics properties, data structures, interfaces, and operational modes. Finally, this paper will describe an experiment being prepared on the Research Flight Deck (RFD) at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center (LaRC) that will use this simulation environment in a human-in-the-loop study.