Project News: Application of Galileo in the LBS environment

Date: 30 November 2007

AGILE project nears end as actions for LBS take up are identified.

On 8 Novemer 2007 the Application of Galileo in the Location-Based Services Environment (AGILE) project, in which ERTICO – ITS Europe is a partner, had it’s final review meeting and identified high level actions to facilitate the take up of Location Based Services (LBS).

The project coordinator, ERTICO Partner LogicaCMG, put together a world-class industrial consortium of 18 companies and organisations from ten European countries covering all links in the LBS value chain. The project aimed at fostering the take-up of Global Navigation Satellite Services in the key sector of mass-market LBS, with special emphasis on the use of the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) and Europe’s upcoming satellite navigation system Galileo. The ultimate objective of AGILE was to define, in detail, a roadmap that will efficiently bring Galileo-based, value-added applications to reality. This will support mobile telephone users, as well as service providers who create and manage location-sensitive value-added services.

Some of the high-level actions identified within the AGILE project are:

• Standardisation of LBS: LBS terminology, but also technology differs from region to region.  It is therefore recommended that these are standardised, especially for use within Europe.
• There is little understanding of integrity of position or service data within LBS, and this needs to be promoted to release new applications, such as those deemed to be financially-critical. To facilitate this action, it is recommended that integrity is re-branded as Quality of Service.
• Numerous simulation activities during AGILE promote the advantages of Galileo and EGNOS in conjunction with GPS and A-GPS.  These are primarily based on design constellation and expected observation error budgets.  Further benchmarking of simulations of present day GNSS needs to occur to provide evidence that the simulations are accurate.  Interpolation to Galileo can then take place to give the audience confidence that the projected performance is realistic.  Results need to be made publicly available to demonstrate the improvements of a combined Assisted-GNSS.
• An information rich webpage should be established to promote all aspects of LBS and GNSS.  This could be built on top of the AGILE website (www.galileo-in-lbs.com) but require further resources to keep content up-to-date.

The project has come to the conclusion that the LBS sector is well on the move forward. The LBS market is still considered as a sector of high potential and huge benefits across the whole value chain. However, the LBS market continues to need stimulation to achieve the growth rates as have been predicted a few years before. Some of the reasons for the slow take-off of the LBS market can be found in discrepancies between offered services and customers’ perception, service providers’ tentative attitude against LBS, and technological limitations. One chance to overcome these limitations is to define and understand the drivers for LBS applications and to force these drivers to become effective.

The upcoming European satellite navigation system Galileo can clearly be seen as an enabler for technological drivers. Compared to existing operational satellite navigation systems, Galileo will bring enhanced quality of service in terms of service guarantee and indoor capability, and, in combination with other systems, improved accuracy and availability. Furthermore, combining satellite-based positioning technologies with network-based technologies (also known as position "hybridization") is regarded as the key to success for seamless position provision required for the successful take-up and use of many LBS applications.

AGILE is a two-year project, which started in October 2005 and due for completion at the end of 2007. The project is managed by the European GNSS Supervisory Authority (GSA) with funds from the European Union’s 6th framework programme.

For more information, please visit the AGILE project website at www.galileo-in-lbs.com