GACELA
GALILEO Centre of Excellence for Latin America

Even though the existing constellations are the basis for GNSS applications, the application market is rising every year. Once it is operational in 2014, Galileo will widen the range of GNSS applications when 95% of the benefits will come from applications in terms of revenue. It is now time to act and set up an infrastructure to support the industry in the R&D phase, as well as to promote the creation of this latent market for regional end-users’ needs and regional stakeholders.

Among all the themes encompassed by the FP7 Second Call, EC/GSA sees the International Co-operation as a must to create an appropriate framework to support the initial definition and implementation of actions with third countries, which are ready to collaborate under the Galileo umbrella. In particular, EC/GSA is willing to co-operate with Latin America to create this necessary infrastructure which will start with a Galileo Centre of Applications where institutions, universities and industry will find the most suitable framework to fulfil this challenge.

Based on the accumulated experience from previous studies in the region (Celeste, fLAre, LATINO) and in conjunction with benefits from existing European initiatives, the GACELA activity constitutes the appropriate framework to support the initial definition and implementation of actions with Latin America.

Description

GACELA appears to be the perfect framework for co-operation with Latin America where the GNSS markets are mature enough to scale up the collaboration at different levels: institutional, industrial and university.

The GACELA project is organised around three main phases:

• The background description phase covers the preliminary study and analysis of the state of the art: the regional GNSS market, industrial and technical elements, as well as an analysis of the political dimension.
• Based on the main outcomes from the first phase, the development phase consists of a thorough study of the topic in order to define the different implementation steps for the future Centre: strategic plan, implementation plan, design and development plan, and exploitation plan.
• The concluding phase provides the synthesis of the results achieved to reflect concrete actions to turn the Centre into reality, ensuring an appropriate follow-up of the project.
  In parallel to these three phases, the promotion of the activities ensures that the awareness and dissemination actions achieve maximum impact.

The activity intensively supports international co-operation; three of the seven partners are regional experts and important GNSS players in Argentina. In order to reflect the real GNSS situation and needs of the region, the whole activity is being performed in close collaboration with the regional partners.

Objectives

The GACELA Consortium proposes the creation of a Galileo Centre of Expertise. The objective of GACELA is to prepare the GNSS industry and market in Latin America by offering support to the mechanisms favouring the penetration of Galileo when the signal in space becomes operative.

The Centre aims at providing the region with the necessary means to foster local industry and facilitate the introduction of Galileo. The Centre will provide the support for the development of applications based on GNSS and adapted to the regional end-user needs.

The main objective, therefore, is to define the tools and services that could be offered by such a Centre, via the development of GNSS (Galileo+GPS) applications tailored to the needs of the region.

The specific tasks to be performed are:

• to define the implementation steps for the completion of the first Galileo Centre of Expertise outside Europe, based in Argentina;
• to define the technical means for the development of GNSS technology and application;
• to identify the GNSS technical and industrial capacities along with the related GNSS needs.