ITHACA
Integrity Service Complementing EGNSS High-Accuracy

The increased interest in autonomous transportation technologies, in which accuracy position estimation and integrity play a key role, opens a wide range of opportunities for enhanced GNSS systems. Both Galileo and EGNOS have the chance to evolve to cope with the challenging requirements imposed by the autonomous transportation systems, including autonomous transportation in road, maritime and rail applications.

The main objective of the ITHACA project is to study whether an integrity service complementing European GNSS (EGNSS) High Accuracy Services is beneficial for the market and its impact on the evolution and adoption of the solutions for the different transportation sectors. A panel of experts is consulted to validate the integrity concepts and the primary outcomes of the project. This complementing integrity service is implemented on top of the current baseline EGNSS services in the 2030+ timeframe. Its main objective is to cover the evolving needs in autonomous transport. The conditions of the most useful safety-relevant applications are investigated during this project. In this context, it has been shown that the usage of individual sensors is not enough to guarantee the high accuracy and integrity requirements on the position computation. Therefore, this project's key objectives are to assess the combination of different technologies and sensors that meet expected user requirements. Within this analysis, EGNSS is considered the leading key player, combined with other sensors used in the autonomous systems such as INS/IMU, cameras, LIDAR, odometer, etc. The study also addresses the identification of required evolutions in the current EGNSS Services (EGNOS V3 and Galileo G1G/G2G) to provide the desired accuracy and integrity services. It will also identify the potential steps of the service implementation plan from service concept to service declaration.