Overview
Satellite navigation together with wireless data transformation and geographic information enables many applications enhancing safer, more cost-effective and more environmentally friendly transportation. Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) like GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou are providing more comprehensive and precise positioning and timing services, and also new services for regulated use.
Europe is currently making a great effort to the development of the satellite navigation infrastructure and services through Galileo and EGNOS, which corrects GPS signals. However, GNSS signals and measurements are very vulnerable to both unintended (atmosphere errors and on-earth radio traffic) and intended (e.g. jamming and spoofing) errors. Also general system errors are a threat for several industries relying on position, navigation and timing.
This preliminary study aims to build an information service about the usability of satellite navigation. The service will be giving information about the current and forecasted quality, availability and other information of satellite navigation systems and signals over Finland. It will be accessible via a web interface where information will be displayed graphically using maps, color codes, time series plots and statistical tools. The service is meant to be a useful tool for all industries and individual actors using satellite navigation in their work or other activities, benefiting therefore numerous market segments such as surveying, transportation, banking, agriculture, energy distribution, and location-based services. The quality-monitoring services for GNSS signals provide crucial information about the reliability of the global positioning service (the quality of GNSS signals) especially for critical applications relying on satellite navigation and its reliable functioning. This applies also for the larger audiences using navigation and positioning services. At the moment there is no service available in Finland that monitors the quality of GNSS signals and covers the whole country. There are foreign services available (for example in Sweden and Norway) which do not cover Finland and in which the information about the quality is restricted. This project aimed to build a service that could utilize open information from FinnRef stations. The information from the service would be available for everyone for free via human and machine readable interfaces.
The following steps will be done during the project:
- Identification of end-user groups and example end-users.
- Preparing the contact method – web-survey & personal interview questionnaire.
- Conducting the web-survey and personal interviews.
- Compiling the results and analyzing them to form conclusions => end-user requirements.
- Literature survey of existing services/ portals/tools around the world.
- Integrating all the above information to form the initial service definition Implementing a proof-of-concept demonstrator of the future service.
- Duration of this phase: October 1, 2016 – February 28, 2017 (5 months)
Funding
Results
The final report summarises following results of the project:
Section 1, 2, and 3 are an introduction to this document and the GLAS project. It describes the project scope and schedule for the first phase of activity, including a brief discussion about future phases of the project.
Section 4 presents an executive summary of the report covering the most significant conclusions from this study.
Section 5 lists the end-user groups and example end-users identified in the stakeholder analysis. This list was essential for inviting respondents to the project web-survey.
Section 6 describes the results and conclusions of this web-survey – indicating the expectations and requirements of end-users. The complete web-survey results are provided in Appendix 3.
Section 7 describes the conclusions from the detailed in-person interviews conducted with 4 (expert) end-users to know better their expectations and opinions. The detailed transcripts of the interviews are presented in Appendix 1.
Section 8 presents conclusions from the comparative study of state-of-the-art services similar to GLAS-service available globally. The comparative table is provided in Appendix 2.
Section 9 describes the FinnRef reference GNSS network and its capabilities, because that is envisaged as one of the data sources for the proposed service.
Section 10 compiles all the information from previous Sections to offer an initial service definition for the GLAS-service based on which the first roll-out version of the service will be implemented.
Finally, Section 11 describes briefly the proof-of-concept demonstrator service implemented as a prototype of the proposed GLAS-service.