EGNOS Creates Smart Transport Management Systems for Cities

There are many challenges facing road transport today, from safety to monitoring to traffic management. At this year’s ITS World Congress in Bordeaux, France, the European GNSS Agency (GSA) showed how European GNSS can benefit road applications.

EGNOS, Europe’s satellite-based augmentation system, plays a large role in ITS road applications, though often behind the scenes.

At the recent ITS World Congress in Bordeaux, the GSA put the spotlight on the role it plays in road transport by demonstrating the multiple uses of satellite navigation at the European GNSS Village stand. Organised with the Horizon 2020 project JUPITER, the stand showcased six topic areas where GNSS services play a role. One topic, Traffic Monitoring & Transport Management, focused on how EGNOS can create smart transport management systems for cities.

European GNSS in Action

The communauté d'agglomération du Grand Dax highlighted the use of EGNOS for public institutions. The organisation, which is an intercommunal cooperation of several municipalities in the area around Dax, France, works to create added value projects for the area. With a population of 60,000, Dax is one of the largest cities in the Landes department, but is still considered a small city. In recent years it has been struggling to find a modern transportation system to fit its size and budget. C.A. Grand Dax and its business innovation centre, Pulseo, have been working with EGNOS to develop intelligent transportation systems and use location based services to create a transportation network that works for Dax, with great success.

Another road application utilising GNSS services, GReD, presented its product GeoGuard. “This is our end-to-end service to measure displacements and deformations of structures or the ground, down to a millimetre level,” said Eugenio Realini, general manager of GReD. “It is completely based on cost-effective GNSS receivers and high-accuracy observation processing.”

GeoGuard continuously monitors critical infrastructure and natural hazards, helping to prevent catastrophic failures in infrastructure investments and reduce insurance costs. Since 2000, economic losses due to natural disasters have been around $2.5 trillion worldwide, according to Realini. With a monitoring system that predicts hazards and mitigates or eliminates risks, GeoGuard estimates that $400 billion could be potentially saved between now and 2030.

Also working on natural disasters and road applications, Planetek Italia presented its Preciso Landslide Risk Assessment for Railways, an application that provides periodical supply of a geographical database containing polygons of the landslide areas. Before building roads, municipalities can complete the assessment, which uses modern satellite sensors to evaluate the morphology of the area and the impact construction work will have, as well as potential future risks.

Proven to Increase Accuracy

Traffic Monitoring and Transport Management was just one of several topics highlighting the benefits space technology brings to intelligent transport systems and services. With a growing interest in optimising the use of roads in Europe, the GSA will continue to demonstrate how EGNOS has been proven to increase accuracy and robustness of the positioning.

More Information

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