The european program has been the central topic of the first “Galileo User Assembly”, celebrated in madrid last november. siemens has participated in the assembly with the exposition of its works in the application of Galileo to railway signalling technologies.
Galileo is the European global satellite-based navigation system (GNSS) that is currently being created by the European Union (EU) through the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European GNSS Agency (GSA). This European Global Navigation Satellite System (EGNSS) provides an independent high-precision positioning system to the European Union do not have to rely on the Russian GLONASS and US GPS systems. The first phase of the system was launched in 2016 and is expected to be completed by 2020.
The European program has been the central topic of the first “Galileo User Assembly”, celebrated in Madrid last November. The assembly congregated almost 300 Galileo users that shared their experiences and discussed their needs in this first EGNSS User Consultation Platform.
Siemens has participated in the assembly with the exposition of its works in the application of Galileo to railway signalling technologies. In the framework of the project STARS (Satellite Technology for Advanced Railway Signalling), a European Union’s Horizon 2020 R&I program, Siemens is investigating how to fill the gap between ERTMS needs for safety critical applications and EGNSS services, through a characterization of the railway environment.
GNSS has a long history of safety critical applications in aviation, but this cannot be used as a basis for similar applications in the railway domain because the railway environment for GNSS is significantly more challenging and the certification procedures and related requirements are totally different.
To push GNSS applications into safety applications a much better understanding of GNSS behavior in the railway environment is needed, especially for standardized applications, such as ERTMS.
The main expected results from STARS project are to predict performance in the railway environment in terms of accuracy, availability and safety; to achieve interoperability between equipment of different suppliers and to allow inclusion of GNSS into ERTMS.