EGNOS Payment LIability Critical applications for Users in Road insurancE

Background

EGNOS is the European SBAS and provides corrections and integrity information to GPS L1 C/A civilian signals for positioning and navigation applications over Europe. In particular, integrity information is provided as part of the EGNOS Safety of Life (SoL) service to meet the demands of safety-critical applications in the civil aviation sector (e.g. landing procedures) requiring enhanced and guaranteed performance to GPS standalone positioning solutions. The next generation of EGNOS, EGNOS V3, will augment GPS and Galileo constellations in the L1 and L5 bands and will extend the service area to the entire landmasses of EU member states.

The European Commission is defining the long-term evolutions of the EGNOS programme beyond EGNOS V3, including new services or uses of EGNOS. One potential evolution could lead to the provision of an EGNOS service tailored to liability and payment-critical application users and specifically to Pay As You Drive (PAYD) and Pay How You Drive (PHYD) applications. 

Project objectives

The added value of EGNOS Open Service (OS) and EGNOS Data Access Service (EDAS) with respect to GPS is in the capability to provide enhanced accuracy and availability, independently from the proprietary/specific GNSS receivers’ technology. 

Nowadays, there are products and solutions already available in the market benefiting from EGNOS OS and EDAS and providing:

• Position accuracy enhanced with respect to the GPS positioning solution;
• Increased reliability of the position through a specific level of confidence associated to the measured position, calculated by using the EGNOS delivered corrections and suitably customised for the road application, being a useful information of the relevant correctness especially in the case of potentially unfavourable environments.
• Time to first fix (TTFF) reduction, thanks to the retrieval of the GPS navigation message from EDAS, avoiding the need to wait for full reception of the GPS ephemerides by the GNSS receiver.

These solutions are currently limited, considering that there is no commitment offered by EGNOS service provider related to the use of EGNOS Safety Of Life (SOL) messages in other contexts than aviation. It is therefore an objective of EPICURE to define:

• An integrity concept customised to road insurance applications, in particular considering the various constrained environments applicable to these applications (e.g. urban environments).
• An EGNOS service which will efficiently support these applications, providing the necessary commitments on EGNOS messages used in such an integrity concept.