An augmentation and integrity monitoring network for railway and automotive transportation

In the last years, several studies have addressed the introduction of the GNSS technology in the framework of the high integrity positioning methods for the land transportation. The main emphasis has been spent for the rail environment. The main driver is the possibility to realize cost effective solution for the modernization of the lines without losses in terms of safety. Furthermore, the rail community have recognized GNSS as one of the step charge innovation foreseen in the next generation train control systems. In the recent period, there has been some attempts to exploit the outcome of such studies even in the driverless car applications. As a matter of fact, these two transportation means share the same electromagnetical environment and both of them are subjected to constrained movement profile. Since one of the most important KI in the safety related application is represented by the integrity, we considered the presence of an external augmentation and integrity monitoring network. Particularly, we considered three different approaches for augmenting the PVT solution that are respectively the local area augmentation network, the wide area augmentation network and the 2-tiers augmentation schemes. For all these schemes we carried out the SWOT analysis considering the peculiarities of the application. On the basis of the SWOT, the system integrator can decide to implement the network that better suit its own requirement. In or vision, the best solution is to share a unique augmentation network for both rail and connected cars. In this way it is possible to increase the number of user served by the network itself.