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Designing and Deploying Meaningful Auditory Alarms for Control Systems

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Space Operations: Contributions from the Global Community

Abstract

In the old days, spacecraft alarming notifications to operators were directed, upon arrival to ground, to one of those needle printers. Trained operators could tell, from the length and rhythm of the printer noise, what kind of alarm it was and therefore infer the criticality or the subject. Today, in monitoring and control systems (MCS) currently in use at the European Space Agency (ESA), there is no care to convey information in the sounds, and these alarm sounds have not been systematically designed to indicate the type of system failure and further elicit the desired and accurate operator response. Operators depend heavily on the graphical interfaces in order to pinpoint the source of alarm sounds (see Fig. 1) which further creates cognitive load. Similarly, switching cost from auditory perception to visual perception while finding the source of the information is undesirable when time can be a precious commodity for operators when monitoring valuable spacecraft. Therefore, ESA teamed up with Delft University of Technology and Plymouth University in order to investigate and design a new auditory display for the control rooms located in the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), in Darmstadt, Germany

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Space Agency, OPS-OPC, Darmstadt, Germany

    Bruno Sousa & Alessandro Donati

  2. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Elif Özcan, René van Egmond & Reinier Jansen

  3. University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

    Judy Edworthy

  4. Department of Space Situational Awareness, Bonn, Germany

    Regina Peldszus

  5. Solenix GmbH, Kappel, Switzerland

    Yann Voumard

Authors
  1. Bruno Sousa
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  2. Alessandro Donati
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  3. Elif Özcan
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  4. René van Egmond
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  5. Reinier Jansen
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  6. Judy Edworthy
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  7. Regina Peldszus
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  8. Yann Voumard
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bruno Sousa .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama, USA

    Craig Cruzen

  2. German Space Operations Center, DLR - German Aerospace Center, Weßling, Germany

    Michael Schmidhuber

  3. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, USA

    Young H. Lee

  4. Lunar Exploration Research Division, Korea Aerospace Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea (Republic of)

    Bangyeop Kim

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Sousa, B. et al. (2017). Designing and Deploying Meaningful Auditory Alarms for Control Systems. In: Cruzen, C., Schmidhuber, M., Lee, Y., Kim, B. (eds) Space Operations: Contributions from the Global Community. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51941-8_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51941-8_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-51940-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51941-8

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